This is a region I've been wanting to capture since my first astro image using a DSLR with a wide angle lens, propped against a railroad tie using an intervalometer to shoot a LOT of very short exposures.  I'm just fascinated the mix of dense star field, dark and emission regions and the fact this is one of the large stellar nurseries in the Milky Way.

The area is so large that even a 4-pane mosaic with my setup barely captures the area I want to cover, and it would take more observing good observing nights than I've had in the last 12 months over a couple of years (at least) to get all four panes 'populated' with sufficient exposures per filter.  As a result, I was happy to see this data set from Telescope Live.

This is an LRGB data set; given the recent discoveries associated with Ha/Oiii for M31, I'm curious what a NB survey/deep exposure time would reveal (if anything) for this region.

This cloud sits within the plane of the Milky Way although not centered on it.  As a consequence, the star field is extremely dense, so I pulled the stars back considerably during post processing to allow the Cloud to take center stage.

My post processing is, as usual, completely within PixInsight.  It is a little daunting (at least for me) to get a proper DBE setup on this object because there is literally no background anywhere in the frame that does not have nebula, dust, and/or a dense star field in it.  I experimented with sample placement until I felt comfortable with my results, using that DBE configuration on all four masters.  SPCC was used establish color balance - Star Exterminator was used to extract out the RGB stars for later use.

I did use the PI HDRMT process to spread out the dynamic range, but I did not use Russ Croman's version of the tool that retains the color balance.  Not because I decided not to, but because I didn't think about it at the time.  I will likely test it later to see what it adds to the image if signficant, I will post a revision.

I'm posting two versions - the primary is with the orientation of this region from the SE horizon as seen from my location.  the other is the orientation as imaged from the AUS-2 CCD telescope from Telescope Live.

The data set was acquired from March through August of 2021; I used the date of the final imaging for convencience when inputting the acquisition data.

From Wikipedia:

The Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex is a complex of interstellar clouds with different nebulae, particularly dark nebulae which is centered 1° south of the starρ Ophiuchi, which it among others extends to, of the constellation Ophiuchus. At an estimated distance of 131 ± 3 parsecs, or 460 light years, it is one of the closest star-forming regions to the Solar System.

This cloud covers an angular area of 4.5° × 6.5° on the celestial sphere. It consists of two major regions of dense gas and dust. The first contains a star-forming cloud (L1688) and two filaments (L1709 and L1755), while the second has a star-forming region (L1689) and a filament (L1712–L1729). These filaments extend up to 10–17.5 parsecs in length and can be as narrow as 0.24 parsecs in width. The large extensions of the complex are also called Dark River clouds (or Rho Ophiuchi Streamers) and are identified as Barnard 44 and 45. Some of the structures within the complex appear to be the result of a shock front passing through the clouds from the direction of the neighboring Sco OB2 association.

Temperatures of the clouds range from 13–22 K, and there is a total of about 3,000 times the mass of the Sun in the material. Over half of the mass of the complex is concentrated around the L1688 cloud, and this is the most active star-forming region. There are embedded infrared sources within the complex.   A total of 425 infrared sources have been detected near the L1688 cloud. These are presumed to be young stellar objects, including 16 classified as protostars, 123 T Tauri stars with dense circumstellar disks, and 77 weaker T Tauri stars with thinner disks.

The last 2 categories of stars have estimated ages ranging from 100,000 to a million years.  The first brown dwarf to be identified in a star-forming region was Rho Oph J162349.8-242601, located in the Rho Ophiuchi cloud.  One of the older objects at the edge of the primary star-forming region was found to be a circumstellar disk seen nearly edge-on. It spans a diameter of 300 AU and contains at least twice the mass of Jupiter. The million-year-old star at the center of the disk has a temperature of 3,000 K and is emitting 0.4 times the luminosity of the Sun.