Abstract:
The Two Micron All-Sky Survey was conceived over a decade ago for the express purpose of mapping the Milky Way and the Universe nearby. 2MASS is now complete and the final data products, incuding the extended source catalog (XSC), have been released. The XSC contains nearly a million galaxies to the stated completness goal of K=13.5. While the catalog becomes incomplete at the faintest magnitudes and lowest galactic latitudes due to confusion, at the bright end the catalog is essentially complete down to very low latitudes (b less than 5 degrees), which makes it an excellent survey for the distribution of matter in the nearby Universe. Redshift information is now complete for the 24,000 galaxies brighter than k=11.25. We now have an amazing census of galaxy (baryonic mass) concentrations over the whole sky and inside half a billion light years. We also examine the Infrared properties of galaxies as a function of type, inclination and other properties.