I was out in the Finnish countryside this past August, watching the Perseid meteor shower against the Milky Way core. Experiencing that kind of dark sky inspired me to try photographing deep space myself. I ordered a cheap star tracker, and last week when the sky was clear, I drove an hour away from the light pollution of Helsinki to give it my first try.

Setting up in the pitch black brought its own surprises, I nearly jumped out of my skin when a deer wandered right up to me mid-shoot! I spent an hour capturing over 100 photos of the Andromeda galaxy using my Sony a7C II and a Samyang 85mm f/1.8 lens mounted on a Teseek tracker and a carbon fiber tripod.

Because this was my very first attempt at astrophotography, the learning curve was steep. I shot dark and bias frames but completely forgot my flats. Figuring out Siril to stack and stretch the image was a major hurdle, taking hours of trial and error to pull out the structure of the galaxy before finishing it in Photoshop.

Despite the software challenges, seeing this emerge from the raw data was more beautiful than I could have imagined. I now have a cool new desktop background :D

Settings: 1 hour of 30sec exposures at f/2.2 and ISO 800.