Celestron SkyScout Personal Planetarium Review

Hello fellow stargazers,

Once again I must warn you that I'm going to review a product that most of you probably consider child's play. Well, I have a lot of readers who were just starting out and if you are just starting out this just might be the thing for you. I introduce the Celestron SkyScout Personal Planetarium.

This is not so much a telescope as it is a planetarium in your hand. The sky Scout can identify celestial bodies, planets, galaxies and whole lot of other stuff by simply pointing at an object in the sky and pressing a button. It uses GPS to track your location and locate objects in the night sky. What really cool features is that it will tell you what you can see that particular night from where you're standing. You can even update the data via a memory card so you can have the latest information about the objects in your local sky every time you take this thing out in the field. Like all good electronics, its USB port enabled!

Once again I'm going to warn you that this is probably not for people looking for serious equipment, and willing to spend several hundred to several thousand dollars on a telescope. This is an excellent device for people who take a casual interest in astronomy and want something that will make looking in the night sky and identifying objects as easy as humanly possible. The other thing I must warn you about is a higher rate of product failure. It seems the GPS system doesn't work as well as it potentially could. Lots of people have been complaining that the sky Scout planetarium is either dead on arrival or delivers inaccurate position information, which means you can't find the objects you want to find.

If Celestron works out the bugs of the GPS system I might be able to give this cool little gadget excellent review. Unfortunately, there just too many mechanical errors for me to wholeheartedly recommend this product. That said, this is still a really cool idea especially for the beginner. The Celestron sky Scout has tremendous potential, I just hope the Celestron can work out the bugs.