Throughput of commercial photographic camera lenses for use in astronomical systems

We present measurements of the spectral response function of commercially-available Nikon 35mm photographic camera lenses for use in astronomical instrumentation. Our motivation for this work stems from the fact that several astronomical imaging systems have been deployed or proposed using this type of commercial lens. We have performed measurements of the relative and absolute spectral response function of five commercially-available photographic lenses. These measurements show that these lenses generally have >50% throughput across the entire optical window of 400nm < λ < 800nm.