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SkyScout Tells You What’s Up
By Dave Peterson | July 16, 2008
The skies in Seattle are finally getting to be dependably clear, and that means I can indulge my interest in astronomy a little more often. Sometimes it’s a full-on astrophotography session, but on other nights, I just want to do a little light perusal of the night sky without all the overhead of a heavy telescope and its attendant drives, cables, and counterweights. On those nights, the Celestron SkyScout is just about perfect. The SkyScout is a neat little handheld device fitted with a GPS receiver and an accelerometer. It’s a spotting scope for identification of celestial objects. After you’ve established a GPS lock, just sight on a point of light in the sky that you want to identify, click a button and the name and information about the object appears on a screen on the side of the unit. It works in reverse as well: If there’s something you want to find in the sky, such as the galaxy Andromeda, you can locate it in the SkyScout’s database, then let it guide you toward the object through light-up directional arrows that ring the viewfinder.
Many points of interest have prerecorded narratives that you can listen to on earbuds or headphones, providing a sort of virtual planetarium experience. For the serious techie, one of the most exciting aspects of the SkyScout is the expandability that was designed into it. It has a USB port for firmware updates downloadable from the web, and an SD Card slot for expanded audio narration content. Two such expansion cards are currently available. Also available as an add-on is a small external speaker, making the device useful for small groups rather than just a single observer.
If you’ve ever wondered, “what’s that star?”, this is the gadget for you. The SkyScout runs $299 ($100 less than I paid a while back!), and is available at the Celestron web site.
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