Another find from the houseof3d website is this 3d constellation viewer.

"This 3D visualization widget was written some time ago to illustrate how, if you believe in 3 dimensional space, constellations would look different if you were to view them from far away from the Earth. Some of the stars are near, and some are far. The stars seem to "project" a 2 dimensional image on the surface of the sphere of the sky - but that's just an illusion. And a difficult illusion to escape, at that! Drag your mouse over the constellation. This widget is here to help you get your picture of space off the ground, it's worth at least a few thousand words.

I find that using this widget for a little while has an interesting effect on what I see when I look up at an actual constellation at night - this helps break the "illusion" that the stars are sitting on a flat plane up in space.

Unless of course you believe that the earth is flat, or the sky is a series of spheres around the earth, in which case this little program may make no sense to you at all..."

This is important to bear in mind with my 'Universe in a box' because while from one angle the box will have the two axis of letters against numbers, the other angles will show the data at apparently randomly placements. This means that the data can be interpreted differently and aesthetically. 
I like the correlation this makes between how seeing a constellation from another angle would change your perspective on our position in the universe, and looking at data from a different angle giving a deeper understanding.