Several months ago I discovered Astroterm, a terminal-based astronomy program that can draw the night sky with ASCII characters.
It’s fun. Open it up on a workspace, let it run, and when I need a mental recharge I can kick over to it and see where the planets and major stars are.
One really neat thing about it, maybe due to the way it draws stars, is that, if I reduce the text size to something very small and blow the window up big, I can see where the Milky Way would be in the sky.
Running kinda southwest to north east, the stars are denser. I think, not being an astronomer, that that’s where the Milky Way would be were it visible. There’s too much light pollution any more, and my eyes aren’t what they used to be, but if I could see it, there would be a river of stars across the sky, and we are traveling through it.
So, while Astroterm may not be especially useful, it does serve an important purpose. It reminds me of where we are in, as Carl Sagan called it, “the cosmic ocean.”