The starry core of our spiral Milky Way galaxy, in an infrared image from NASA Spitzer Space Telescope. Obscured behind it is the South Pole Wall, a curtain of thousands of galaxies across at least 700 million light-years.
"Astronomers have discovered that there is a vast wall across the southern border of the local cosmos. The South Pole Wall, as it is known, consists of thousands of galaxies — beehives of trillions of stars and dark worlds, as well as dust and gas — aligned in a curtain arcing across at least 700 million light-years of space. It winds behind the dust, gas and stars of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, from the constellation Perseus in the Northern Hemisphere to the constellation Apus in the far south. It is so massive that it perturbs the local expansion of the universe. But don’t bother trying to see it. The entire conglomeration is behind the Milky Way, in what astronomers quaintly call the zone of avoidance. ..."
NY Times
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A projection of the South Pole Wall in celestial coordinates. The plane of the Milky Way is shown by a dust map in shades of grey; what lies behind it is obscured from direct observation.
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