Introduction

Over the past decade, the observation of the galaxy distribution at large scale has made significant advances thanks to (i) the building of fiber spectrographs with a large field of view and a high multiplex gain (Lewis et al. 2002; Burles et al. 1999, Watson et al. 1998), and (ii) the dedication of large numbers of observing nights or the use of dedicated telescopes for such projects. These observations have led to extensive maps of the distribution of matter traced by the galaxies. The three major projects aimed at mapping the “local Universe” over large solid angles are:

• the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey, an Anglo-Australian collaboration;

• the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a US–Japanese–German collaboration;

• the 6dF Galaxy Survey, another Anglo-Australian collaboration.

In the following, I review these surveys and the remarkable results that they have provided on the large-scale structure of the Universe. I also review the recent or undergoing surveys to higher depth.

The large solid angle surveys

The 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey

The 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS) is now complete and covers ∼1 500 square degrees of the southern sky, distributed in two strip-like regions of 70 to 80° long in right ascension and∼10° and∼14° wide resp. in declination, plus∼80 single fields dispersed over the Southern Galactic Cap. The photometric catalog is based on the APM catalog (for “Automatic Plate Measuring machine” used to scan theUK Schmidt photographic plates; Maddox et al. 1990), which has been re-calibrated using CCD images. The limiting magnitude of the 2dFGRS is bJ = 19.45.