Y-band is a broad passband that is centered at ~1 ${mu}m$. It is becoming a new, popular window for extragalactic study especially for observations of red objects thanks to recent CCD technology developments. In order to better understand the general characteristics of objects in Y-band, and to investigate the promise of Y-band observations with small telescopes, we carried out imaging observations of several extragalactic fields, brown dwarfs, and high redshift quasars with Y-band filter at the Mt. Lemmon Optical Astronomy Observatory and the Maidanak observatory. From our observations, we constrain the bright end of the galaxy and the stellar number counts in Y-band. We also test the usefulness of high redshift quasar (z >6) selection via i - z - Y color-color diagram, to demonstrate that the i - z - Y color-color diagram is effective for the selection of high redshift quasars even with a conventional optical CCD camera installed at a 1-m class telescope.