I'm not sure how most Traveller games go, but for me there seem to be two distinct styles. First, "find a derelict spaceship and investigate" which is really a scifi dungeon crawl, which I believe has been noted on this list in the past. 

The second kinds of games seem to be astronomy oriented, or at least played by people with a significant interest in astronomy, and at least peppering the game with somewhat realistic astronomy can be of interest to the players, or otherwise enhances the setting. It can be memorable to mention the increasing brilliance of Deneb in the sky as the players jump coreward from Terra (misplaced that Deneb is compared to the real world). It's been a goal, never quite realized, to be able to plot a star chart from any arbitrary point in the Imperium. 

There are a few problems with this: Traveller is a 2d universe and attempting to fit it onto realistic space topography can be a frustrating exercise, and Traveller largely disregards many physical laws and a current understanding of solar system evolution. 

None the less, I at least found it interesting when in Interstellar Wars a sidebar ("Looking Home") described the position of Sol in the skies of Prometheus. The main article on Prometheus mentions the position of Proxima in the sky (near the Pleiades/M45). To that end, I took a stab at plotting the sky from Prometheus:

The solid lines represent the proper motion of the sun and proxima centauri between now (2018) and imperial year 1116, and then the dashed lines represent a further 20,000 years. The Sun is actually moving more quickly across the Promethean sky than Proxima Centauri is on its 550,000 year orbit. The motion is the output of an nbody integrator and I used the position data of Alpha Centauri A+B and Proxima Centauri from this paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.03495.

Despite the description of Proxima Centauri being "near Pleiades", it's actually not all that close, at around 4h 19m 41.4s right ascension, 11 degrees 58 minutes 39 second declination now, and 4h19m5s RA, 12d52m54s declination at year 1116. The Sun (Terra) and Proxima are about 52.8 degrees away from each other in Prometheus skies - possibly of interest when doing jump shadow / jump masking calculations. 

One item that often gets bounced around is the concept of attempting to bring Traveller up to date - computers are far more prevalent now than they were when Traveller got its start and some of the work needed to update Traveller wouldn't be that bad these days. 

For example, it might be interesting to give Kepler orbit elements (and define the invariable plane for the system) for each object in a system in addition to its mass and size and what moons it has. The current system configuration could be computed rapidly on the fly for each visit to any given system with computers. 

That will, however, do nothing for the dungeon crawl crowd and will probably only serve to annoy them. 

So that was probably a long winded way of asking all of you how you handle astronomy in Traveller. Ignore it? Occasionally mention planets and stars but otherwise ignore it? 

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