Celestron SkyScout Personal Planetarium

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	Celestron SkyScout Personal Planetarium
	$399.00 At Amazon on 9-28-2008.

The idea is genius - marry a GPS with an accelerometer and create a device that can tell you exactly what star it is pointing at, or direct you to any visible star. And it pretty much works as advertised. We've used ours on several nights so far, and everyone in our extended family has wanted a turn spotting different stars. <br /> <br /> The info on the major stars is plentiful. The audio is a nice idea, but it just reads the same information that is on the text display. Sighting can be a little tricky through the plastic tube, but even faint stars took no more than two or three tries to spot. <br /> <br /> The precision is good, but not great. If you point to Orion's belt, it's going to list all three stars. You'll have to read the descriptions to determine whether you are interested in the eastern-most, western-most, or middle star. Did you know that the middle star of Orion's belt, Alnilam, is 50% farther away than the other two? Or that Alnitak, the leftmost star in the belt, is primarily a hot blue supergiant star that is 6 million years old and has already begun to die? Those are the kinds of things SkyScout will tell you. Fun stuff. <br /> <br /> <br /> It is very sensitive to metal - you can't use rechargeable batteries, and it comes with special tubes to you have to put the batteries in. We couldn't use it standing next to a big swing set, for instance. A little symbol pops up on the video screen and it refuses to work. <br /> <br /> The software is PC only. No Mac version in the works as of now. We haven't tried running the updater in parallels or VMWare yet. Updates seem fairly rare anyway. <br /> <br /> It's a little pricey, but all in all, I really can't find too many negatives about it. It's amazing. Back To Top
Celestron SkyScout Personal Planetarium Available from Amazon $399.00 Updated on 9-28-2008.

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