Abstract: The zoom fish-eye lens had the characteristics of much larger field-of-view angle, much larger relative aperture, and much larger anti-far ratio. In the work described in this paper, the initial structure of a fish-eye lens with fixed focal length was firstly designed using the theory of a plane symmetric optical system. And then the initial structure components of the fish-eye lens were divided into two groups, the former-group and the rear-group, and then the entire zoom fish-eye lens system was optimized using Gaussian optical theory. Finally, a zoom fish-eye lens system with good imaging quality was obtained. This fish-eye lens system had a field-of-view angle of 180° with an 8 mm short focal length and a field-of-view angle of 90° with a 16 mm long focal length. Its relative aperture was 1/3.5. The design results show that the modulation transfer function of this zoom lens system at different focal lengths is no less than 0.45 when the spatial frequency is 50 lp/mm. This zoom fish-eye photographic objective lens had higher imaging quality than other zoom fish-eye lenses.