Reconstruction of the Zone of Avoidance

The uncovering of the large-scale structure that is hidden in the Zone of Avoidance is essential to our quest for the understanding of the dynamics of the nearby universe. Dedicated and sophisticated observations of the Zone of Avoidance have to be matched by equally sophisticated theoretical tools for the reconstruction of the large-scale structure from sparse, noisy and very incomplete data. A general approach for the estimation of cosmological parameters and the reconstruction of the density and velocity fields is presented here, based on maximum likelihood analysis, Wiener filtering and constrained realizations. Radial velocity surveys and the IRAS 1.2 Jy redshift survey are used to reconstruct the Zone of Avoidance.