Have you tried Elite Dangerous? It leans more towards the Sci-Fi aspect but those elements can be ignored and you could just spend your time exploring the milky way like a lot of others do (even more so if you use VR), if I recall they sourced real data to build the universe and extrapolate to fill in the blanks. Sure it isn't the universe but it's still a pretty good way to explore our galaxy

Elite Dangerous doesn't give you nearly the sense of scale that Space Engine does.

Have you tried it in VR?

SpaceEngine let's you zoom through _galaxies_ like that old windows screensaver was for stars. I've always sorta understood that the universe was "big", but it never clicked how infinite it really is until I zipped through SpaceEngine for an hour.

That said, Elite: Dangerous is pretty awesome. It helps ground how far away everything is. Even with the game's FTL travel, the fact that it takes actual weeks to reach Sagattarius A* boggles the mind.

I believe the scale isn't correct in many places to enhance gameplay. That said, it is pretty great in VR and the universe replica they created is unmatched in any game.

An extremely cool program for showing interplanetary and star size perspective is Titans of Space Plus in virtual reality.

It takes you on a tour of our solar system showing various bodies at different scales compared with each other. I don't want to spoil the ending sequence, but it nearly floored me.

Does it play well with planetarium projectors?

Does it have any kind of UI for a , er, second screen, so you can input your destination or configuration off the proyector?

It's been several years since I've had access to a planetarium to test, but back around 2015 it had support for full-dome projection, though it wasn't bug-free. It may have improved, but planetariums have never made it very high on Vladimir's priority list for the program, at least back then. I think he could easily dominate that market if he went for it, with his only real competition being Uniview (http://www.scalingtheuniverse.com/)

If I remember correctly, I mapped many keyboard shortcuts to navigate quickly and without obstructing the view significantly. That said, it definitely took a lot of flying practice to not get me and the audience sick while shooting around the galaxy.