I'd like to use it to virtually roam around our Galaxy. It should be able to play with the GAIA DR 2 data sets and work and play nicely with either Snow Leopard or Yosemite versions of OSX (preferably both, but I'll take what I can get). Any suggestions?
Not that I know of but I imagine you'll need a hard drive to store comprehensive data about 130 million stars. (The approximate 10% of the 1.3 billion stars measured for which accurate parallax data is available.) https://m.esa.int/About_Us/ESAC/Gaia_creates_richest_star_map_of_our_Galaxy_and_beyond Of course, 130 million stars is less than 0.1% of the total number of stars in our galaxy but large parallax means they will usually be relatively nearby - within approximately a few kiloparsecs (a parsec is 3.26ly), according to this document: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.09376.pdf If the second release is available, I might download the entire catalogue just so I can do some private research. I think I have a few terabytes of storage to spare. http://gea.esac.esa.int/archive/
https://www.redshift-live.com/ext/en/ maybe this is what you're looking for? This entry has more alternatives and suggestions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift_(planetarium_software)
I kind of think I had something like that with my telescope, but its probably windows xp in date. I wouldn't be able to part with it, but maybe I can think of the name. it had the function to link up to the telescope by rj45 port connection
Seemingly so. According to the website, Redshift for Mac accesses Gaia data online: https://www.redshift-live.com/ext/en/shop/products/37437.html