  We introduce the properties of the Two Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS) survey
for IAU Symposium 204. 2MASS is a near-infrared survey of the entire sky
characterized by high reliability and completeness. Catalogs and images for 47%
of the sky are now available online. This data release has been used by Wright
(2000) and Cambresy et al. (2000) to subtract the stellar foreground at 1.25
and 2.2 microns from COBE DIRBE data, revealing the cosmological near-infrared
background.
