Celestron SkyScout Personal Planetarium?

Question

is this a good stargazing tool for a family? im wondering if my ten year old son would benefit from it. he alreayd has a telescope.

Answer 1

I have to disagree with those who don't recommend this product. My son is seven and we've been having a ball with the Celestron SkyScout since I first heard about it during the 2006 Consumer Electronics show, where it received high praise. We got it shortly thereafter and have used it a lot.

For us this gadget gave us a missing piece - the narrative and context for what we were looking at in the sky. The headphones are easy to use, and it's fun listening to the descriptions of the various stars, planets, and nebulae with the detailed audio sequence. Also the GPS locator makes it really easy for inexperienced (young) hands to get an exact sighting for various stars. I've seen how frustrated my son was in the past working with just our telescope. The SkyScout has been a good tool for him.

It also encourages us to locate smaller, less "famous" stars and nebulae. It helps you to go beyond the "usual" astronomy tour of Sirius, Arcturus, the Pleiades, etc. and go seeking less significant yet still impressive stars and objects.

That's what my son has enjoyed most - going after the smaller things in the sky and finding the more obscure objects.

So I'd say give it a try - at the worst, you'll get a few months of passionate use out of it, and at the best, your son will use this tool throughout his school years to enrich his appreciation of the stars.

IDman

Answer 2

I must agree with aman -

If he has a telescope and is having difficulty finding things in the night sky - this will not help him much. Having gone through three scientifically minded sons myself, I'm fairly certain that this would be a dazzling object on Christmas morning that would be attempted once or twice, then discarded or hidden in the back of the closet until it is found when they leave for college (now, in our case).

I would highly recommend the book Nightwatch by Dickinson. It is not a text - it is a great and useful book with accurate pictures and EASY TO USE star charts (the easiest I've seen anywhere). I would have loved it when I was a kid. This will help him to learn the night sky, instead of relying on a gadget to tell him what he's pointing at.

Answer 3

It's a cool gadget. And that is all it is. Not worth spending the money on. I would rather buy him a bunch of entry level astronomy textbooks. Yes, the stuff 18 year old students are reading!

If your son is ten, has an interest in science, likes to read and uses his telescope, he needs science texts to explain to him what he is looking at and how the professionals are talking about these things. He does not need simplified science junk. He can handle the truth.

I think I got my first textbooks when I was that age. Actually.. I didn't get them, I picked them. My parents went into a bookstore with me and I was allowed to buy about a dozen books of my own choice. I did not learn until many years later that half the books I picked were professional textbooks for freshmen. I read them and I understood enough of the material to have fun with these books for many years. I still have them and I still use some of them to look things up.

When I was thirteen my physics teacher gave me a list of books to read. All of them are professional textbooks used in the first to third semester physics and entry level math.

Having said that, I am no genius. I was simply a kid interested in science. And that interest got only stronger the more professional material I had to chew on. In hindsight I wish I had grown up with the internet and Wikipedia. I could have assimilated much more material years before I got exposed to it at the university where I had access to a real science library for the first time.

Just an idea. It might or might not be the right solution for your son. A gadget, IMHO, is certainly not.

Answer 4

The upside of having a planetarium would be that he and you as well would learn the constalations but compare the cost of this and how long you think you may actually use it and it may be cheaper to just go to a planatarium on a regular basis until you do learn all about the night sky,, I tend to agree with the above as far as reading science and astronomy literature,, It is far more knowlege in it,, good Luck to you,,