Panoramic
view of the entire near-infrared sky reveals the distribution
of galaxies beyond the Milky Way. The image is constructed
from the more than 1.5 million galaxies in the 2MASS
Extended Source Catalog (XSC), and the nearly 500 million
Milky Way stars in the 2MASS Point Source Catalog (PSC).
The galaxies are color-coded by their distances inferred
from their photometric
redshift (def.) deduced
from the K band (2.2 microns) or as given in the NASA
Extragalactic Database (NED). Blue are the nearest
sources (redshift < 0.01); green are at moderate
distances (0.01 < redshift < 0.04) and red are
the most distant sources that 2MASS resolves (0.04 < redshift < 0.1).
The all-sky map is projected with an equal-area-Aitoff
projection in the Galactic system -- Milky Way at center.
The Two Micron Sky Survey
(2MASS)
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Image Index
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