This title certainly needs context and explanation.

As you may guess - given the possibility that you may have endured the pain or delight of watching my gallery - I'm usually not doing extreme wide-field imaging (whatever extreme might mean in terms of FOV).

So this is another early attempt and I still feel a bit of difficulty in assessing the image quality. For example, for most of my images, I tend to reduce the background brightness to much lower values as you may find them here. However, I believe doing this to this image might increase contrast too much. Also, the numbers of stars is simply overwhelming compared to deeper/narrower views into space. This gives new impressions and so let me know your opinion if I managed to get something reasonably well out of the data.

But why (extreme) wide-field?
Well, not because I really want to do wider fields than usual but because I want to be able to follow my hobby even if I might travel for vacation. As most of you can imagine, a family trip by airplane and bringing the telescope along might be a logistic (and possibly social/political) problem. Therefore, in the early months of 2021, I purchased a mechanical star tracker (I simply call it egg timer) which I never really started to use. Such a small device + tripod + DSLR and a lens or two might be a feasible solution, given an overdetermined system of equations.

Nevertheless, as we all hope, the time will come where we'll probably travel again and so I should learn to use the tracker at some point. And that's the explanation for a wide-field image like this. 

Why this area of the sky?
I had done some imaging in recent weeks of the Sh2-171 region with different focal lengths. Those projects by themselves aren't completely finished but it was an intriguing idea to put the fields of view in context and do some sort of wide-field to detail story. That's why I chose to capture this area of the sky.

For the first time, I also gave my new camera lens from Canon a try. It's a prime focus EF 50mm f/1.8 which I stopped down to f/3.4 for this image to tame the aberrations of the optics. Yet, at f/3.4 the lens is still significantly faster than the Canon EF-S 18-55mm kit lens which would only allow f/5.6 at this focal length.
Check out the image at full size. It's pretty surprising how well the stars were tracked and the lens images the stars. Of course, there are aberrations as you reach the corners but for a lens which is just above 100 Euros (new!), I'm not inclined to complain. En contraire, I'm praising it as a very good lens for a very good price.

What do we see here?
We're seeing the border region between the constellation Cassiopeia and Cepheus. My DSLR is not modified and so all the Hydrogen alpha regions don't pop out as they would do with an astro camera. Also the total integration time is just about half an hour.
This image contains some well-known objects like the Bubble nebula (NGC 7635) or the Pacman nebula (NGC 281), which are even "visible" here and worth their own image, or the Sh2-171 nebula region, which is rather often displayed here on AstroBin as well. There are also several open clusters, e.g. M52. 
So in summary, there are several objects which could allow some nice images on their own. 

As I've written earlier, my initial project was the Sh2-171 region and in detail Cederblad 214/LBN 581. You can see this region in the very center of the image. In order to show you what difference it makes to use equipment with higher focal length and dedication to narrowband imaging, I've created a revision that includes the Hydrogen alpha image as an inset. You should be able to follow the link and continue the story about this triplet of images:
https://astrob.in/7ouij2/0/

Feel free to comment!