I was out in the Finnish countryside this past August, watching the Perseid meteor shower, which inspired me to try photographing deep space myself. I ordered a cheap star tracker, and last week I drove an hour away from the light pollution of Helsinki to give it my first try.

This is my capture of the Pleiades star cluster from that night. I used my Sony a7C II and a Samyang 85mm f/1.8 lens mounted on a Teseek tracker and a carbon fiber tripod, spending an hour and a half capturing over 100 photos.

Because this was my very first attempt at astrophotography, the learning curve was steep. I remembered to shoot dark and bias calibration frames but completely forgot my flats. Figuring out Siril was a massive hurdle, taking hours of trial and error to understand how to properly stack and stretch the images to pull out that faint blue reflection nebulosity around the Seven Sisters without blowing out the stars. Seeing this deep space object actually emerge from my raw data was incredibly rewarding.

Settings: 1.5 hours of 30sec exposures at f/2.8 and ISO 1600.