This visualization presents a 3-D view of the largest structures in the universe. It begins with data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and zooms out to reveal data from WMAP.

But zoom out to enormous scales like clusters of galaxies ... it could help cosmologists explain some of the greatest ...

One reason it is hard to learn the geography of the local universe is that it is 3-D. A map, as a 2-D object, is easy to spread out on a table so you can learn 2-D relationships between places.

Galaxies are the building blocks of the universe. Clusters of galaxies ... Within the disk, the brightest stars trace out the characteristic spiral pattern. Elliptical galaxies are shaped roughly ...