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)