This is a flight through the Universe as seen by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (sdss.org). There are close to 400,000 galaxies in this animation. The original rendering is full HD and stereoscopic.

This animation corresponds to the redshif range z=0.01-0.1. The far side of the survey (z=0.1) is approx 400 Mpc (1.3 billion light years).

The template matching was done in color-concentration index space. This gives a very good representation of the visual properties of the galaxies. The galaxy size is proportional to the physical size of the observed galaxy. Elliptical galaxies are pseudo-volumetric ellipsoids with random ellipticity.

The rendering was done in Blender blender.org using python scripts to load galaxy positions and textures. The template generation, matching and other procesing was done in IDL and some c++ using CGAL for density field estimations (for the pre-rendering)

More details in my blog: miguelaragon.wordpress.com/

Update:
Part of this animation was shown at the National Geographic documentary "Inside the Milky Way (Star city)", another documentary for Japan TV, a couple of shows at the Adler planetarium and the first 3D concert performed by the California Symphony.