Before I went out to White Mound County Park with a friend and fellow Milwaukee Astronomical Society member, Lee Keith, I considered objects to image with my telescope and unmodified camera; as I am still waiting for the CLS-CCD (a filter that is compatible with a full-spectrum T3i) and thus am without my modified camera, I would need to image mainly broadband targets. I love star fields and dark nebulae, so it did not take me a while to figure out what I would image.

I located Scutum and was able to see the Scutum star cloud with direct vision, vividly, from our Bortle 4 sky site, and I could even see M11, the Wild Duck Cluster, through my viewfinder. I was considering whether to decrease the ISO after seeing just how bright the individual two-minute subs were!

The Scutum star cloud is a massive star cloud located around 6,000 light years away in the constellation Scutum. Just zooming in will make evident many thousand of stars, occupying almost every pixel on the frame (trust me, it was very difficult to do background extraction with almost no dark areas on the entire image). Located inside the next closest spiral to the core of the Milky Way (other than our spiral), the star cloud is directly visible from mid-latitude skies as dark or darker than a Bortle 4 sky. Outside of the Sagittarius star cloud and the Cygnus region, it is the most beautiful naked eye part of the summer Milky Way. 

Scutum is also home to the Wild Duck Cluster (Messier 11), an open cluster some 6,120 light years away from Earth. Despite the cluster's young age (276-376 million years), it has an unusually high metallicity, hinting at the possibility that an early core collapse supernova event actually enhanced the metallicity of the molecular cloud. Nevertheless, as it is a young cluster, most of the stars that you can see in the image are young, bright, white and blue stars, rather than orange or yellow - as is typical with globular clusters. 

There are also many dark nebulae visible in the star cloud. There are at least a dozen nebulae on the LDN (Lynds Catalog of Dark Nebulae) catalog, including LDN 516, LDN 518, LDN 521, and LDN 522. These nebulae were visible on individual exposures, and are impressive in the stacked and processed image. All or most of the nebulae in the image are in the Scutum arm of the Milky Way galaxy, 6,000 light years from us.

The image was taken at White Mound County Park near Plain, Wisconsin; I used an unmodified Canon EOS Rebel T5i and my William Optics Redcat 51 with my iOptron SkyGuider Pro to take 2 hours and 18 minutes of data in the early night. No computers or external software was used to create this image, except for in post processing.