  The numerical action variational principle is used to find fully nonlinear
solutions for the orbits of the mass tracers given their present redshifts and
angular positions and the cosmological boundary condition that the peculiar
velocities are small at high redshift. A solution predicts the distances of the
mass tracers, and is tested by a comparison with measured distances. The
current numerical results use 289 luminosity-linewidth distance measurements
designed to be close to unbiased. A catalog of 1138 tracers approximates the
luminosity distribution of galaxies in the vicinity of the Local Supercluster,
at redshifts cz < 3000 km/s. These mass tracers include groups with crossing
times less than the Hubble time and isolated galaxies. The measure of merit of
a solution is the sum of the mean square differences between the predicted and
observed distance moduli. In the 3000 km/s sample, this reduced $\chi^2$
statistic has a well-defined minimum value at M/L=175 and $t_0 = 10.0$ Gyr, and
$\chi^2$ at the minimum is about 1.29 times the value expected from just the
standard deviation of the distance measurements. We have tested for the effect
of the mass at greater distance by using the positions of Abell clusters as a
model for the large-scale mass distribution. This external mass model reduces
the minimum value of $\chi^2$ by about 10\% ($\sim 1 \sigma$). The value of the
cosmological density parameter $\Omega_0$ is determined by the global mean
mass-to-light ratio. Our preliminary analysis yields $\Omega_0= 0.17 \pm 0.10$
at one standard deviation. A tighter bound is expected to come out of a larger
sample of measured distances now available.
