Hacker News Reader

For an astronomer that lives there, yes. For naked eye would be mostly black sky, just like ours on edges. That's why I love our place, it shows our galaxy beautifully stretching across.

View on HN

Do we have software to easily simulate that?

Celestia[0][1] can just about do it. In principle, it can show you what you'd see from any point in space. In practice, it's limited by the data it has (for stars, it uses the Hipparcos Catalogue, which only contains ~ 100,000 stars of the ~ 250 billion that are in the Milky Way) and displays the Milky Way, outside our "immediate" neighbourhood (i.e. several hundred light years), as just a set of amorphous blobs. Hence you can visualise the Milky Way as seen from the edge of the galaxy, but it'll be rather blurry. (It also obviously doesn't include the newly discovered warped shape.)

Edit: For this purpose, I think that this "Chrome Experiment"[2], might be better.

Also see "Gaia Sky"[3] which I haven't tried, but which looks really interesting and may well do what you want.

[0] https://celestia.space/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestia

[2] https://experiments.withgoogle.com/100000-stars

[3] http://sci.esa.int/gaia/60036-gaia-data-release-2-virtual-re...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com