Kelly and I are shopping around for potential Christmas presents. In the “wish I had enough money to buy it” category is the Celeston SkyScout Personal Planetarium. This is the Holy Grail of astronomy tools, in my book:
The SkyScout is a revolutionary handheld device that uses advanced GPS technology with point and click convenience to instantly identify thousands of stars, planets, constellations and more. Simply point the SkyScout at any star in the sky and click the “target” button–the SkyScout will instantly tell you what object you are looking at.
In other words, its like having an expert astronomer in a box. Imagine walking around with Carl Sagan in a box!
Eww. Nevermind. But, still! Being able to point this thing at a star and have it tell you what it is (“that’s the sun, you idiot”) would be out of this world! Dadgummit, what will they think of next?
The second question I had when I saw this was: can it do celestial navigation? All of our deep space spacecraft use the stars for navigation. Most of them have electronic brains that make the Commodore 64 seem advanced. If this thing can identify stars, celestial navigation can’t be far behind.