N(H₂) in L1688, taken from Herschel Gould Belt Survey archive. Positions of the continuum cores reported in Motte et al. (1998) are indicated by arrows. The dashed rectangle shows the area used to calculate mean cloud properties (see Sect. 4.3). The solid black contours show the coherent cores in the region (described later in Sect. 4.4). The 1′ beam, which the data was convolved to, is shown in orange in the bottom-left corner, and the scale bar is shown in the bottom-right corner.