Astron. J. 151, 52 (2016)

The Milky Way is a sight to behold, especially on a dark night on top of a volcano. However, what if you want to view the galaxies behind it, in the region known as the zone of avoidance? Then the bright band of stars leads to 'stellar confusion', obscuring optical and infrared telescopes. But the 21-cm H I transition lines from neutral hydrogen gas suffer no such obscuration, so Lister Staveley-Smith and co-workers have successfully used the Parkes radio telescope in Australia to peer through the Milky Way. They detected 883 galaxies, including 254 that were previously unknown.

Beyond the Milky Way lies the Great Attractor, a gravitational anomaly that is expanding non-uniformly. It is also drawing our Galaxy, as well as the neighbouring Andromeda galaxy. We know superclusters of galaxies lie in the region. Wider area and deeper scans will help build a detailed map of the local structure to improve our understanding of the source of the gravitational attraction.