This animated flight through the universe was made by Miguel Aragon of
Johns Hopkins University with Mark Subbarao of the Adler Planetarium and
Alex Szalay of Johns Hopkins. There are close to 400,000 galaxies in
the animation, with images of the actual galaxies in these positions (or
in some cases their near cousins in type) derived from the Sloan
Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 7. Vast as this slice of the
universe seems, its most distant reach is to redshift 0.1, corresponding
to roughly 1.3 billion light years from Earth. SDSS Data Release 9 from
the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), led by Berkeley Lab
scientists, includes spectroscopic data for well over half a million
galaxies at redshifts up to 0.8 -- roughly 7 billion light years distant
-- and over a hundred thousand quasars to redshift 3.0 and beyond.