Astrophotographer Greg Meyer captured an impressive view of the star nursery of Rho Ophiuchi and the Globular Messier 4 group while attending a Stargazing event in Texas last month.
Meyer used a chamber of refrigerated thermoelectric monochromatic astronomy mounted on a 61 mm raptor raptor telescope to break 17 separated exosuras three to five minutes from the fixed interstellar cloud. In total, it played a total of 14 hours and 45 minutes to imagine Rho Ophiuchi with a series of red, green, blue and luminance filters duration of the Stargazing event of the Texas Star Party 2025, which took place from April 20 to April 27.
The resulting data were processed expert using the Pixensight astrophotography software, along with Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop to create a rich interstellar view or gas clouds swimming, and dark and dusty filaments.
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“A favorite among astrophotographers, wanted to try it from an area of Sky Dark, and was at the Texas stars party in April 2025,” Meyer said in an email to Space.com Discussion his obhiuchi observation. “This object was increasing after midnight with the Milky Wayso [I] I could get some good data with my portable platform for several clear nights. “
The Rho Ophiuchi Nebula system is the closest region than stars formation LandAnd as such has been under the scrutiny of both the Hubble Space Telescope and the Space James Webb telescope in recent years.
Brighter among the stars captured in the colorful portrait of Meyer is the old red giant Antareswhich can be found by illuminating the right side of the cosmic view. About Antares near the top of the frame is the famous Global Messier 4 group, which is estimated to house about 100,000 stellar bodies, According to NASA. Another dense city of stars NGC 6144 designated can be seen to the upper left of Antares, while the bright stellar trio of Rho Ophiuchi B, C and D seems to illuminate the structure of the surrounding cloud in the upper left of the image.
As is almost always the case when it comes to deep sky objects, the different elements that comprise Meyer’s scene are not close to each other as they appear. For example, NASA estimates That Rho Ophiuchi is located about 390 light years from the earth, while Antares, which seems to be totally on the nebula structure, is approximately 550 light-year Far. Meanwhile, Messier 4 is even more remote, sitting about 5,500 light years from our planet.
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