Date: 15 Sep 2010
Copyright: Sloan Digital Sky Survey Team, NASA, NSF, DOE

This illustration depicts the large-scale distribution of galaxies as seen by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an ambitious project that determined the distances of about one million galaxies.

The two cones on the left of the image are a three dimensional (3D) map of the galaxies with the Earth at the centre. Going from the centre to the upper/lower edges of the map, more and more distant galaxies are seen, up to distances of about 2 thousand million light years. The colour of the galaxies is related to their luminosity. The clumpiness in the distribution of matter is clearly visible in this representation.