The Antares/Rho-Ophiuchus Region
The region at the Scorpius Ophiuchus border is one of the most beautiful in the entire night sky. The giant yellow star Antares dominates the lower central region of this photo and it is surrounded by an unusual yellow reflection nebula. Toward the top of the image are three stars with the designation of Rho Ophiuchus. They are surrounded by a large blue reflection nebula called IC 4604. Dark dust lanes can be seen going to the left from this region. The small bright reflection nebula to the upper right of Antares is SH2-9. Just right of Antares is the large globular cluster M-4. Close above-right of Antares is the smaller globular cluster NGC 6144.
For this image hypered Kodak Technical Pan B&W film was used with red and green filters to get two of the three channels for a RGB composite. For the blue channel, a composite from two exposures of hypered Kodak PJ 400 film was used and it's blue channel extracted for combination in this composite. The camera lens used was a Nikon f/2.8 180 ED. Exposure times were R = 60 minutes at f/5.6, G = 60 minutes at f/4, and B = 2 x 30 minutes at f/4.