Striking at naked eye or with binoculars, the Scutum Star Cloud and it surroundings hold many treasures, but maybe the most intriguing, to me, is the Wild Duck Nebula (M11) open cluster, prominent here at the above and left of the center of the image. It is very compact, and being almost 14 times further that the Pleiades cluster, its stars seem tiny glittering beads. Please have a look at the annotated version for identifying other interesting objects such as M26, Sh2-54, IC1287, IC1276 and the uncountable Barnard and Lynds dark nebulas).

The core of M11 was a bit of a challenge here, at this image scale the cluster is tiny and its stars cannot be resolved.

135mm, f/2.8, ISO 2000

26x 120s