We know that if the metaphorical camera that took that picture pulled back far enough, other galaxies would crowd into view and then clouds of them until our own was just a speck of dust.

The filigreed pattern of clumps, knots and ribbons traced by that dust, theorists tell us, arose from microscopic, quantum irregularities in space-time left behind by force fields during the Big Bang and then amplified a gazillion times by the expansion of the universe and the slow rumbling of gravity.

For a cosmologist, this lordly view of the largest possible scale, in which we can see God's own brush strokes, might be the most fundamental and revealing map of the universe.

But that won't do for the rest of us who see everything we know and love and yearn for crammed vanishingly into a single insignificant pixel.

"Objects close to us may be inconsequential in terms of the whole universe but they are important to us," Dr. Gott and his colleagues write in a paper describing their map and posted on the physics Web site at arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0310571.

How to do justice both to the grandeur and the complexity of the universe?