The study of low-mass prestellar cores is a difficult task which needs to gather several tools, dust and gas observations, radiative transfer modelling. No single tracer can reveal the physical characteristics of these cores. We show that based on observations of N2H+, and dust from 1 µm to 1 mm, one can hope today to have a faithful 3D description of a dark cloud and its prestellar core. Dust being ill-defined, only the combination of absorption, scattering and emission measurements and modelling can alleviate the degeneracy between temperature, density and emissivity of the dust.