Mapping the Neighborhood (Broadly Construed)

Via The Map Room, something called the Six-Degree Field Galaxy Survey (shortened, with the sort of radical anti-melliflousness only a team of astronomers could muster, to 6dFGS) has mapped a chunk of the nearby universe containing more than 110,000 galaxies.



The survey covers more than 80% of the Southern sky out to 2,000 million light years; it documents where galaxies are and where they're going. According to Universe Today, the study also measured the mass of the galaxies indirectly: by "measuring the galaxies’ movements, the researchers were able to map the gravitational forces at work in the local Universe, and so show how matter, both seen and unseen, is distributed."

As Jonathan Crowe notes, the scale of the map (as he posted it) is about one to eleven quintillion - "almost certainly the smallest scale we will ever see."

I'm going to take that as a personal challenge.