  The 6dF Galaxy Survey (6dFGS) aims to measure the redshifts of around 150,000
galaxies, and the peculiar velocities of a 15,000-member sub-sample, over
almost the entire southern sky. When complete, it will be the largest redshift
survey of the nearby universe, reaching out to about z ~ 0.15, and more than an
order of magnitude larger than any peculiar velocity survey to date. The
targets are all galaxies brighter than K_tot = 12.75 in the 2MASS Extended
Source Catalog (XSC), supplemented by 2MASS and SuperCOSMOS galaxies that
complete the sample to limits of (H, J, r_F, b_J) = (13.05, 13.75, 15.6,
16.75). Central to the survey is the Six-Degree Field (6dF) multi-fibre
spectrograph, an instrument able to record 150 simultaneous spectra over the
5.7-degree field of the UK Schmidt Telescope. An adaptive tiling algorithm has
been employed to ensure around 95% fibering completeness over the 17046 sq.deg
of the southern sky with | b | > 10 deg. Spectra are obtained in two
observations using separate V and R gratings, that together give R ~ 1000 over
at least 4000 -- 7500 Angstroms and signal-to-noise ratio ~10 per pixel. The
6dFGS database is available at http://www-wfau.roe.ac.uk/6dFGS/, with public
data releases occuring after the completion of each third of the survey.
