I realized pretty quickly that the street light outside of the house in Toledo made it nearly impossible to capture an image of the stars.

Luckily I was planning a move to Westerville OH where the nights were darker and I had some more space to find a good place away from lights. I did some research and found out that the really amazing pictures are taken with really long exposure times while mounted on an automated rotator.

In case you didn’t know, the Earth spins relative to the stars. Which means the stars appear to rise and set just like the sun and moon. A motorized mount can be used to counteract the Earth’s rotation. Providing stable, always in frame images of whatever you’re trying to capture.

So I acquired one! I bought a skyguider pro from iOptron.
This mount requires that I align the motor to point to the celestial pole. And in the Northern Hemisphere that’s as easy as finding the north star. Once I understood how to set this up, I was finally able to capture my first target, the Pleiades.

See how the trees are blurry, but the stars are sharp! There is even an airplane in this image, which shows that it’s a long exposure. I’m skipping some steps, like focusing and the settings on the camera, but these are covered in much better detail across the internet.