If rich clusters of galaxies contain 1000 galaxies each, and such clusters are 50 million light years apart, how many galaxies lie within a billion light years? If each galaxy needed a 5 minute exposure to get a spectrum, how long would a survey of this volume take? Can you put that in (pre)historical perspective?

How does this compare with the older CFA (Center for Astrophysics, Harvard) survey and with the SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Survey)?

Below are plots showing different slices of The Las Campanas Redshift survey. The first plot shows one slice, the second shows two slices, etc.

Why bother with six slices? Below are plots showing rotated views of the 6-slice plot. The first shows the slices made North of our Galaxy's disk (red, green and blue) almost edge on, and the second shows the slices South of our Galaxy's disk (magenta, cyan and black) almost edge on. 

Why is it valuable for a survey to have some slices close together, but others far separated?

The next image shows the all six slices in an orientation such that the North slices appear face on:

It does not matter which slice you look at -- there are way fewer galaxies far from the apex (that's where we are!) than near by. Does it really seem likely that the density of galaxies is less far from our own?

Next, consider the black slice alone: 

The image has been oriented so that you see the slice face on. Zoom in:

How would you describe the structure that you see? Compare this to a sponge and to a raisin muffin -- what is the difference between a journey from any fiber of sponge to any other fiber of sponge on the one hand, and from raisin to raisin on the other? Try exploring another region:

In general terms, is the structure the same?

The next image shows a zoomed in region dense with galaxies near to the apex. Notice the empty area:  

This a a void -- the equivalent of the air in a sponge, encompassed by the sheets and filaments of the sponge itself. The axes are velocity of recession in km/s. Can you use a value of the Hubble constant -- say 70 km/s/Mpc to estimate a size for the void? How does this compare with the size of our Local Group of galaxies, the distance to the Virgo cluster, and the size of the Local Supercluster?

The plots below show successive zoomed views of a large feature in the un-zoomed black slice:  

How confident are you that this really is a single structure, and not just a chance alignment of galaxies? Using the same approach as you adopted for the voids, estimate the size of this structure to get an idea of the typical size of sheets and filaments in our Universe.

This final image shows a zoomed-in view of the structure near the apex of the black slice:.