This plot shows over one and a half million of the brightest stars and galaxies in the nearby universe detected by the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) in infrared light.
Away from the Galactic plane, vast majority of the dots are galaxies, color coded to indicate distance, with blue dots representing the nearest galaxies in the 2Mass survey, and red dots indicating the most distant survey galaxies that lie at a redshift near 0.1.
