The summer Milky Way passes overhead in this very wide angle photograph of the constellation Cygnus.
In this photograph you can easily see the North American Nebula almost center, with many other deep sky objects as well. Looking into one of the Milky Way's spiral arms, this area is full of gasious nebula, star clusters, and dense dust.
To capture this shot I used a simple 28mm camera lens, stopped down to f/5. I attached a minus-violet filter which removes ultra-violet and violet, colors that will bloat star images due to chromatic aberation in low-quality camera lenses. Stopping the lens down from f/3.8 to f/5 kept the stars from being blurred around the sides. This increased the exposure, but was well worth the extra effort!
One of my favorite photographs, the width of this shot is hard to imagine. Look at the North American Nebula in this photo. Outside, you can just barely cover that whole nebula with one outstreched hand. The image of the bright star Deneb to it's upper right is about the size of the full moon with this lens - that's how much sky this photograph covers!
Cygnus (Milky Way) Wide Field
