Can I shoot astrophotography with a 50mm lens?

I have a Nikon D5200 and the Nikkor 50mm 1:1.8G lens and I really want to start astrophotography. I don't have money to buy the real lens but I was wondering if I could use this lense because it can go to infinity. Also can you give me some tips on how to actually shoot the pictures.

The 50 mm f/1.8 lens is a real lens, but it is a medium telephoto lens when attached to your D5200

The better lens to use for shooting the night sky is the 18-55 mm lens that came with your camera with the lens set to 18 mm.

And yes, manually focusing the lens at infinity is what you need to do.

You will also need a tripod and make some tests with the ISO set to 200 and shutter speed set to 20 to 30 seconds. At that point all you have to do is adjust the lens aperture until you get the best exposure.

What I have done is shoot in RAW to get the most amount data and shoot time lapse. Later I stack the images.

The 55-200mm would work better.

All dSLR lenses can focus to infinity and the 50mm lens is as real as any lens can be. Yes, you can shoot the sky with the 50mm. If you are to target a certain star only, then most probably not. You need to attach your camera to a telescope to do that.

The wider the angle, the better. Otherwise, you will want to use something with a tracker on it because you will not be able to hold the shutter open for long before the stars begin to blur. 50 mm would not show much in terms of sky and foreground anyway. The Tokina 11-16mm lens was great for this. They do have cheaper wide angle lenses than that such as the Rokinan 14mm (but it is a fix focused lens that doesn't have built in auto-focus).