Galaxy quest illuminates dark corners of the universe
http://www.smh.com.au/national/galax...0401-9jrc.html
IT IS the most detailed map of its kind ever created, showing 110,000 "nearby" galaxies, within 2 billion light years of our world.
Every dot is "another Milky Way, with billions of stars," said Heath Jones, the leader of a team of Australian astronomers that spent 10 years undertaking the survey in an effort to unravel one of modern astronomy's biggest mysteries...
They began planning the Six-Degree Field Galaxy Survey in the late 1990s. From 2001 to 2006 they used the Schmidt telescope at Siding Spring, in northern NSW, to take images of the galaxies. Yesterday, with the data finally collated, they released their map...
See also
http://www.aao.gov.au/local/www/6df/
and
http://www.aao.gov.au/local/www/6df/Gallery/index.html