About the Image:This amazing widefield image of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex was taken in a single extraordinary night with my good old uncooled Canon 700Da at the
Rooisand Desert Ranch in Namibia.
In addition to the well known colourful nebulosty around Antares, I also wanted to capture the surrounding nebulosity, including the stunning Blue Horsehead.
At a distance of about 460 lightyears, Rho Ophiuchi is one of the closest star forming regions in the milky way.
It features different emission and reflection nebula, lots of dust, bright stars (such as Antares) and several globular clusters (like Messier 4).
The black dust lanes are connecting the cloud complex with the milky way core, which can easily be seen with the naked eye under the Bortle 1 skies of Namibia!
The Blue Horsehead reflexion nebula at the bottom of the image is in a similar distance than the Rho Ophiuchi complex and has a radius of about 40 lightyears.
Another stunning feature of the image is the Sharpless - 1 reflection nebula in the upper left corner.
Used Equipment:I used my mobile equipment that I brought from Germany into the Namibian Desert, my AZ-GTI mount in equatorial mode, my Canon 700Da and my standard lens Canon 24-70 F2.8L USM II which i set to ~50mm and F3.2.
Guiding was done using a mini guidescope and an ASI120MM mini guidecam.
Processing:The processing of the image was done completely in Pixinsight, using the "X-Tools", HDR Multiscan, LHE and other advanced processing techniques to bring out the maximum detail.
Trivia:This turned out to be actually a quite stressful excercise, as manually monitoring 3 rigs at the same time, and dealing with goto hickups, image checking and refocusing keeps you quite busy.
At the same night I also imaged the same target in parallel using two other telescopes which acquired the data for this amazing
Rho Ophiuci 6 Panel High-Res Mosaic - please check it out!
Special thanks to:- Andy Bender and the colleagues from
Sternwarte Meckesheim for the company and keeping alive the coffee supply throughout the whole night!
Comments welcome!
Best Regards and Clear Skies!
Nico
https://www.sternwarte-meckesheim.de /
http://www.astronico.de 
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