any software to help draw the galaxy map?

[joeclark77 (OP)]

Does anybody know if there is any software (or even an algorithm...) to straighten out a network graph like the galaxy map?  I mean something that would take a list of nodes and edges and give you back a picture of the graph optimized for the shortest/cleanest paths with no overlaps. 

There was an online game I was playing a few years ago (Planarity: www.planarity.net) where you basically do this as a puzzle: the game will give you more and more complex graphs and you had to rearrange them so there were no overlapping edges.  I wasn't very good at it and would like to automate the solution this time around!

[Narmio]

Your best bet is probably "neato", part of the graphviz package designed to use spring-and-mass based algorithms to nicely lay out undirected graphs.  You can find graphviz at graphviz.org and there's instructions for using neato here: http://www.graphviz.org/pdf/neatoguide.pdf .  You'd need to get the map out into a .dot format, which might take a bit of work, but once you have that working neato will make things easy.