What sort of wide angle lens would I be looking for for night Aurora photography

[MichaelRyanSD]

I have an older Canon Rebel XT with the stock lens. I was looking for a wide angle lens, but not sure what I should get for shooting Auroras at night. Any suggestions

Here's some of my first pics from the past couple nights

 

[Ink.]

Did You use tripod?
First four looks extremely blurry (I'm not sure if its out of focus or rather shaken because of long exposure and lack of tripod). And from this point of view the lens and/or camera model doesn't matter because there is inappropriate technique. As far as it looks now - I can tell that scene was extremely fantastic and had great potential.

I'd recommend You spending money on participation in photography course or some additional teaching aids like books or video tutorials.
Keep posting photos - its the quickest way to maintain progress

 

[Seventen]

Seems you was quite out of focus on pictures there. If you have a live view on the camera it is good to zoom in to a bright star or planet and manually set your focus, You should be able to get great images with the lens you currently have, before upgrading the lens I would put money towards a decent mount and a shutter release cable (If you dont already have that is)
If your really set on getting a wide angle one I see a lot of people/friends using the Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 wide angle lens for Aurora. But its not cheap around 700 euros. Dont know the kind of budget you have but even the cheapest of wide angle lenses are quite expensive. I would keep what you have and get the basics done before upgrading as even with the kit lenses you can get some awesome aurora images.

 

[MichaelRyanSD]

Yeah, I realize the first set of pictures were way out of focus, I was using an Auto-Setting when I realized what I had set up earlier in the day wasn't going to work. I did have a tripod, with a timer, but they still came out out of focus, which sucks because the aurora was going off that night.
Here is a second set of pics taken the next night once I figured out what was wrong, but unfortunately no real aurora was out.
View attachment 66311

 

[Seventen]

The second lot of pictures there is quite a lot of star trailing which will make it look rather blurry. There is a basic rule to stop trailing not 100% perfect due to where you live but you can get a rough idea. The rule is divide the focal length by 500 so 500 divided by focal length of 20mm is about 25 second exposure time, dont forget a 20mm on crop sensor camera is about 33mm give or take a few mm. so will need to divide 500 with 33 giving only about 15 second exposure time.

 

[lambertpix]

When people look at wide-angle lenses for a crop-sensor Canon, Tokina's 11-16 f/2.8 lens and Canon's 10-22 usually wind up in the conversation. For daytime use, Tokina's wider maximum aperture typically doesn't help much, but at night, the faster aperture might help you. You might have trouble keeping a crisp foreground if you're shooting at f/2.8, but the mountains in your shots are far enough away that I'd expect you'd be fine.