Galaxy peculiar velocities in the Zone of Avoidance
  Dust extinction and stellar confusion of the Milky Way hinder the detection
of galaxies at low Galactic latitude, creating the so-called Zone of Avoidance
(ZoA). This has hampered our understanding of the local dynamics, cosmic flow
fields and the origin of the Cosmic Microwave Background dipole. The ZoA ($|b|
\le 5^\circ$) is also excluded from the "whole-sky" Two Micron All-Sky Survey
(2MASS) Redshift Survey (2MRS) and 2MASS Tully-Fisher Survey (2MTF). The latter
aims to provide distances and peculiar velocities for all bright inclined 2MASS
galaxies with $K_s^o$ $\leq 11\hbox{$.\!\!^{\rm m}$}25$. Correspondingly,
knowledge about the density distribution in the ZoA remains limited to
statistical interpolations. To improve on this bias we pursued two different
surveys to fill in the southern and northern ZoA. These data will allow a
direct measurement of galaxy peculiar velocities. In this paper we will present
a newly derived optimized Tully-Fisher (TF) relation that allow accurate
measures of galaxy distances and peculiar velocities for dust-obscured
galaxies. We discuss further corrections for magnitudes and biases and present
some preliminary results on flow fields in the southern ZoA.
