Tour the Night Sky with Celestron's SkyScout

I have always been one of those people who wished they knew more about stars. I live in a reasonably rural area and like looking up at the night sky but the attempts my father made during my high school years to teach me a few things about what's above us were mostly lost on me; now I'm one of those dads who waits nervously for his daughter to get old enough to start asking questions I don't know the answers to.

The SkyScout Personal Planetarium is a GPS-enabled device that can locate and identify stars, planets, and constellations in the night sky, and tell you about them. By locate, I mean you can select a star, planet, or other object from its menu and it will guide your eye to it using a clever ring of lights that serve as a sort of directional scope. By identify, I mean it knows where you're pointing it and can tell you what a specific star or night-sky object is at the press of a button.

We had one shipped on loan from Celestron, and played with it for about a month this summer. It's a dream come true for an astronomer in the making. I try to avoid blurby praise in my reviewing, so please understand, it really is like a dream come true: sort of magical, way too easy, certainly of limited use regarding my ultimate goal - in this case, to actually know this stuff - but also a device I could really see helping me get to the point where I can pick out a few of the highlights, device-free, for a wide-eyed five- or six-year-old. (Gives me some time.)

Guy pictured above? Not me. The SkyScout is very hard to take pictures of without feeling like a phony, because you really use it in the dark, but you have to pose with it in the light. So I just borrowed this image from Celestron's marketing materials.

At a bit over three pounds, the SkyScout has the heft of a nice thick copy of Moby Dick, and its aura of well-earned weightiness is borne out in the SkyScout's prodigious feature set - it's an astonishingly powerful device for those of us who find ourselves staring at the heavens and wishing we knew a bit more than how to (maybe) find the Big Dipper and the stars in Orion's belt. Take this outside in a reasonably dark sky, get away from utility poles and at least a few feet from your car, and the GPS system will kick in and quickly prepare itself to tell you whatever you want to know about the night splendor that surrounds you.

This is what it looks like to look through the scope - inside, of course, where there's light to (barely) photograph it. You can just barely make out a tiny red triangle on the right if you look closely - those arrows will appear at whatever primary or secondary compass point (N, NW, W, etc.) you need to shift the device in in order to reach a target object you have selected. Look, a brick!

You can also select groupings like constellations, and the SkyScout will lead you through it star by star to help you identify its constituents. The device has a library of 6,000 objects it can identify, but its knowledge base beyond naming is far smaller - in the hundreds, I'd guess. No, that horse does not have five legs - that last one is a line pointing to the star Regulus.

In a way, the screen is primitive, but in another way, there is really nothing primitive about a GPS-enabled device that identifies 6,000 objects in the night sky with the push of a button. The screen is well-designed with progress bars for audio, scroll bars for text content, and an easy-to-navigate menu system.

A competing device by Meade called mySKY has come on the market that uses a full-color LCD screen. The Meade device looks like a 1980s-era video game console gun and has an open sight along the barrel. Given the care with which objects need to be centered in the SkyScout's field of view to be considered the target for an "identify" command, I am curious to know if the open sights are easier or more difficult to use with precision, and how the screen's quality and brightness impact the experience. Since each of these devices pair an inclinometer with GPS to determine the device's position, both have the hardest time identifying objects near the zenith (horizon). Both hug the $400 range as the "sweet spot" in pricing this type of device, but Celestron is offering a $50 rebate on the SkyScout through Nov. 30, which drops its price to $350 on Amazon.com.

The SkyScout's menu is intuitive and easy to navigate. It features some basic native "tour" options and Celestron has plans to begin selling long-awaited SD cards with enhanced tours beginning in November for about $20, including an in-depth guided history of astronomy. One of the coolest features of the SkyScout is it's "Today's Highlights" feature, which will walk you through the top twenty things to see on any given night.

The more prominent objects all offer audio narration - just plug in a pair of headphones and you can listen and look instead of reading from the screen. Dual headphone jacks would have been a nice bonus, but then again only one person can look at a time anyway. If you're using the attached high-powered laser pointer Celestron is now selling to go along with the device, however, that second jack might come in handy. The SkyScout does have a USB port for firmware upgrades and data on "new discoveries."

The unit is clearly designed to be used in the dark. In addition to backlighting all the buttons, Celestron's design groups and distances buttons from each other in a way that makes it very easy to call up key functions - "locate," for example, to get info about what you see through the scope - without taking your eyes off the prize. We found ourselves easily accessing some of these features within a few uses.

Pictured here with a preternaturally unrelated CD, Teach Me Russian, to give you a sense of its size.

After I'd fiddled with it for a few nights, Jenni got curious and took the SkyScout out herself, and was instantly hooked. Since we were using the device in the height of summer and darkness fell after our three-year-old daughter's bedtime, we never had a good chance to use it with her, or even in her presence, and I think she's probably still a bit young to appreciate that stars have names or to really connect the dots that turn stars into constellations. But after we'd spent a few weeks playing with it, we were genuinely sad to send this thing back.

Do you have kids old enough to talk about the stars with? Any favorite astronomy or solar system books for young kids you can recommend to us and other ZRecs readers? Let us know in the comments!