system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What Does Sagittarius A* Look Like?

Suppose we were able to exist at a safe distance from Sagittarius A*.  Perhaps we are in Carl Sagan's Ship of the Imagination.  What would we see?  What about various distances?  Do the stars that orbit it move fast enough for us to see with the naked eye?  Is there visible matter surrounding it?  What would such a hole in space even look like?  How would it bend light and spaetime?  Etc... etc... etc...

I am an author writing a story about a man who has visions of Sagittarius A* and I want his visions to be accurate despite the fact that he is insane.
gpt
Well - most things are really a matter of perspective, and it all depends on where you are when you're looking. The black hole itself isn't that far across, at least in cosmological terms. Estimates vary, but it might be as small as 24 million km across: on the range of a very large star, and within the orbit of Mercury.

The star closest to the black hole does move very quickly: up to 1% of the speed of light at periapsis! But periapsis is still 40 billion km away. It takes 11 years to complete an orbit, even though it's so fast, so it'd still take 5.5 years to cross half the sky. Probably too slow to watch.

However, there's some hope, because it's an elliptical orbit, and it's much faster as it gets in closer. Much better, but it'd still be almost three years per orbit, so too slow to watch. Most of the motion you see in the night sky is, after all, based on the Earth's rotation.

Of course, there are probably many objects in much closer than that star, and they could be moving at all sorts of speeds. So a smaller object might look like something zipping through the sky, like a satellite.

As far as those smaller objects go, though, we haven't been able to detect anything specific; it's below the resolution of our instruments. 

But we do believe there to be a large cloud of gas and dust, superheated because of the black hole's pull. We're blocked from detecting this in visible light, but there's evidence it's extremely bright. So your observer might not be able to be too close, if he's still able to see at all.