One late night in 2007, Rogelio Bernal Andreo and his wife were driving down Highway 1 along California’s Lost Coast, when his wife opened the moon roof. What spread out above them looked nothing like the mauve sky near their Sunnyvale home.

“It was like the Milky Way was in front of us,” said Andreo, a former early eBay employee, who runs a Spanish-language internet company. “It looked like it was gonna fall on us.”

He pulled out his digital SLR camera and spent two hours trying to capture the vast galaxy. When he got home, he downloaded the photos, and caught the astrophotography bug.

“I started to look on the internet and see all these pictures, really gorgeous pictures,” Andreo said. “I said, ‘How do people do this?’”

Two years of intensive study, rigorous practice, and perhaps $10,000 of equipment later, he knows. And he let Wired.com in on his process. Step-by-step, we’ll break down how he went from the black-and-white star scene below to the mind-blowing space photo above.

.... His equipment list is long. He packs a Takahashi telescope, Takahashi mount, tripod, SBIG STL11000M camera, adapters, cables, deep-cycle marine batteries, an Asus eee laptop, food and coffee of course. ....