The 2MASS catalog has proven to be quite versatile to the astronomical community: supporting observation and future mission planning, seeding studies of star formation and morphology in nearby galaxies, penetrating the zone of avoidance, providing the base catalog of redshift and Tully-Fisher HI surveys, and so on. But perhaps its most important function is to provide the "big picture" context for analysis and interpretation of data concerning galaxy clusters, large scale structure and the density of matter in the Universe. And so the primary motivation of this work, with the construction of qualitative "road" maps to the local Universe, is to provide a broad framework for studying the physical connection between the local Universe (Milky Way, Local Group, Local Supercluster, "Great Wall", etc) and the distant Universe where galaxies and the cosmic web first formed.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Joe Mazzarella (NED) and John Huchra (CfA) for kindly providing galaxy redshifts. And a special thanks to Joss Bland-Hawthorn for organizing the LSS workshop (in honor of Brent Tully) that inspired this paper. This publication makes use of data products from 2MASS, which is a joint project of the Univ. of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, funded by the NASA and the NSF. This work was supported in part by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with NASA.