Rebooting Celestron’s Sky Scout starfinder

January 30, 2012 at 10:13 pm

Last year, I got a Sky Scout personal planetarium – the handy GPS-based device from Celestron, which allows you to point at an object in the sky that you’re curious about, press the “Target” button, and see text scroll across the devices’ screen telling you what you’re looking at. In many cases, you can also choose to have a voice read you a short audio documentary on what you’re looking at.

On the flip-side, if you know what you want to see (and it’s in the sky), you can select it from a menu (the menu arrows are built like a TV remote – so for e.g., you would choose “Locate” > “Tonight’s Highlights” > “Andromeda Galaxy” or “Locate” > “Planets” > “Jupiter”) and the Sky Scout will “point” to it with a series of red LEDs inside the viewing area that will play a game of “hot and cold” with you until you’ve “arrived” looking at your destination object.

OK, on to the reboot…

While a bevy of competitor GPS devices and apps have flooded the market since Celestron became a mainstream consumer electronics darling and “hot new product of the year” award winner with the original GPS star finder, I’ve recently found two additional uses for this handy device:

1. picking out hard-to-find solar system objects at dawn or dusk before training my Celestron telescope on them or doing the same for faint deep space objects in the night sky that I don’t know by heart.

2. and perhaps most exciting – new use I’ve found for my Sky Scout is as a makeshift onboard computerized star finder for any scope with a camera mount (that thread on top of the rings on the mount for many alt-az and equatorial mounts) that I want to attach it to.

While a zero-power finder such as the Telrad will allow you to locate objects whose rough location you know, the Celestron Sky Scout telescope will actually point you right to the planet, star, or deep space object you want to see (and the $260 for the Sky Scout is less than the added cost of many computerized telescopes and maintains a more grassroots feel to stargazing than the convenience of a full GOTO computerized motor-driven mount.)

Thanks to the Sky Scout being a GPS unit, all of this gets done with no calibration required on your part.

Taking it to the next level

Celestron even has a Sky Scout-friendly “SkyScout Scope” telescope whose camera-tripod-style mount makes using your Sky Scout as a “piggyback” computerized star finder easier. (Similarly, some telescopes incorporate GPS technology into their mounts to align themselves as well.)

Perhaps the coolest aspect of mating your existing “unplugged” non-computerized telescope with a finding device such as a Sky Scout (presently, Sky Scout is the only such device available with the correct camera tripod thread to do this) is the fact that you can unscrew it in seconds and once again use it as a robust (semi-shock-proof, water resistant) star finder on your next backyard astronomy session or your next wilderness stargazing adventure.

Sky News contributing editor Peter McMahon’s “Wilderness Astronomer” column appears in each issue of the magazine. You can find more of his campsite stargazing writing and images at wildernessastronomy.com

* Full disclosure note: The 80 mm telescope mentioned in this posting was generously furnished by EfstonScience for promotion and evaluation purposes. Over the years, I’ve been happy to collaborate with the Efston family and appreciate their support of me as both a space promotion brand and as a science storyteller. PM