  About 25% of the optical extragalactic sky is obscured by the dust and stars
of our Milky Way. Dynamically important structures might still lie hidden in
this zone. Various approaches are presently being employed to uncover the
galaxy distribution in the Zone of Avoidance (ZOA) but all suffer from
(different) limitations and selection effects.
  We investigated the potential of using the DENIS NIR survey for studies of
galaxies behind the obscuration layer of our Milky Way and for mapping the
Galactic extinction. As a pilot study, we recovered DENIS I, J and K band
images of heavily obscured but optically still visible galaxies. We determined
the I, J and K band luminosity functions of galaxies on three DENIS strips that
cross the center of the nearby, low-latitude, rich cluster Abell 3627. The
extinction-corrected I-J and J-K colours of these cluster galaxies compare well
with that of an unobscured cluster. We searched for and identified galaxies at
latitudes where the Milky Way remains fully opaque (|b| < 5deg and A_B >
4-5mag) - in a systematic search as well as around positions of galaxies
detected with the blind HI survey of the ZOA currently conducted with the
Multibeam Receiver of the Parkes Radiotelescope.
