Earlier this year I rented a Tamron SP 35mm ƒ/1.4 Di USD lens to use for shooting the Perseids meteor shower. Yes, I know, the Moon was an issue in 2025 but I wanted to test this lens. The reason I was interested in a 35mm ƒ/1.4 can be seen in this article at Clarkvision.com in which he describes the best combinations of aperture vs. focal length to maximize the number of meteors per exposure. And the choice of this particular lens was informed by this review article.

While I did not capture many meteors (the Moon, remember?) I was impressed with the optical quality of this lens. In fact, I ended up purchasing the rental lens since I had already done my testing with that particular sample.

I have used this lens on a couple occasions to photograph Comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) in which I used tracking to get a 2-minute exposure of the comet followed by untracked to get a similar exposure of the foreground. The results were further proof that this was a very good lens with sharp stars all the way into the corners.

Earlier this month I put it to another test when I did exposures of the Milky Way and aligned the camera so that the Milky Way passed diagonally across the lens and into the corners. I then stacked ten 2-minute images using Siril.

These images were shot with the aperture wide open at ƒ/1.4, ISO 200, and 120 seconds.

Interestingly, the result was too many stars! Indeed, the wide-open ƒ/1.4 aperture captured so much light that there were too many stars so I used some star reduction techniques available in Siril. The reduction technique resulted in a very pleasing final image presented here.

This will be a useful addition to my collection of astrophotography lenses for capturing wide views (54.3° x 37.7° field) of the night sky.

Edit: 11/20/2025 Fixed typo.