Large Scale Structure Observations
  Galaxy Surveys are enjoying a renaissance thanks to the advent of
multi-object spectrographs on ground-based telescopes. The last 15 years have
seen the fruits of this experimental advance, including the 2-degree Field
Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS; Colless et al. 2003) and the Sloan Digital Sky
Survey (SDSS; York et al. 2000). Most recently, the Baryon Oscillation
Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS; Dawson et al. 2013), part of the SDSS-III project
(Eisenstein et al. 2011), has provided the largest volume of the low-redshift
Universe ever surveyed with a galaxy density useful for high-precision
cosmology. This set of lecture notes looks at some of the physical processes
that underpin these measurements, the evolution of measurements themselves, and
looks ahead to the next 15 years and the advent of surveys such as the enhanced
Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS), the Dark Energy Spectroscopic
Instrument (DESI) and the ESA Euclid satellite mission.
