Sky Scout star finder

A while back I got a Celestron SkyScout start finder, courtesy of my wife. This is a portable gadget that uses a combination of GPS, magnetometer, and inclinometer, all solid robotic sensing technologies, to identify a star. You look through a hole to target a star, but the star identification process has nothing optical about it, which is a very neat trick. I describe it in the enclosed video (which is my first little experiment in video blogging -- next time, I'll try not to do it right after a bad night's sleep).



Oh, if you want to find it on Amazon.com, then click here. They call it
the Celestron SkyScout Personal Planetarium. They also have a version
combined with a green laser pointer.

Shortcomings of the Celestron SkyScout: takes a few minutes to acquire a GPS lock, LCD display is not great in very cold weather. Neither of these is serious.

Shortcomings of the video: too low a speaking volume, cluttered background, I look really tired.