{"id":35176,"date":"2026-02-01T19:22:47","date_gmt":"2026-02-02T00:22:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=35176"},"modified":"2026-02-01T19:22:47","modified_gmt":"2026-02-02T00:22:47","slug":"visualizing-the-milky-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=35176","title":{"rendered":"Visualizing the Milky Way"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Several months ago I discovered <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/da-luce\/astroterm\">Astroterm<\/a>, a terminal-based astronomy program that can draw the night sky with ASCII characters.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1092\" height=\"997\" src=\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Screenshot_20260201_191215.jpg\" alt=\"Screenshot of Astroterm, showing the night sky as it stands about when I wrote this.  The stars are dense from roughly southwest to north east, which is where the Milky Way would be.\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-35177\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Running kinda southwest to north east, the stars are denser.  I think, not being an astronomer, that that&#8217;s where the Milky Way would be were it visible.  There&#8217;s too much light pollution any more, and my eyes aren&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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, &#8220;the cosmic ocean.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Several months ago I discovered Astroterm, a terminal-based astronomy program that can draw the night sky with ASCII characters. It&#8217;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<a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=35176\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">&#8220;Visualizing the Milky Way&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[128],"tags":[5402,5140,655],"class_list":["post-35176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","tag-astroterm","tag-linux","tag-milky-way","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35176\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}