SkyScout

Back from Vegas and Toronto. I think Lucy got used to me being out of town because she is a bed hog again.

Vegas was great and Toronto went very well for my new process that had never been run on plant scale equipment. Vegas was mostly about college basketball and the only thing on TV in Toronto was the World Curling Championship. You know you are watching too much curling when you can see the flaw in their shot selection before the TV announcers mention it.

My first trip to Toronto came back in Dec. At the time Rachel told me she had already picked out my Christmas present. It turned out to be the Bose Quiet Comfort 3 noise canceling headphones (5 out of 5). I am actually wearing them right now w/o an ipod. I like to wear them at night on the computer to help me relax before bed.
Anyways...back on the plane in Dec, I was trying to guess what Rachel chose for me. I no longer guess out loud after our first Christmas together when I thought the "guess the presents while they are still wrapped" game would be a lot of fun. It wasn't.
Seriously back to the story... there was an ad for an item in the magazine I was reading on the plane. For some reason I thought this was possibly the present that Rachel had picked out for me. It was a great item but very far removed from anything I had ever discussed needing. The Bose noise canceling headphones I had talked about before. Really anything Bose is safe.

So, when I discovered we were getting a tax refund, I decided to buy this item.

It is the SkyScout by Celestron, a hand held planetarium. Using GPS and Accelerometer technology it knows exactly where you are and in which direction you are holding the SkyScout.
To make it short, I looked through the viewfinder at a bright star in the sky and hit "target" and it told me I was looking at Saturn. It then gave me some scientific data on Saturn's distance, period etc and an audio on the history of Saturn.
The other thing you can do is ask it to locate an object for you like Mars, and using red directional lights it will guide you around the sky until you are looking at Mars. It also has a mode where you can see Today's highlights and see what objects are in view for you at the time you are looking in the sky.

Rachel and I have been talking about going to Hocking Hills this summer for vacation, I can't wait to try this out in a really remote, dark, area. I was using it in our front yard and we have a lot of light pollution from Cincinnati. Using the Sky Scout I would guess the Apparent Magnitude limit in our neighborhood is about 5.0. The Spiral Galaxy was in in my field of view but w/ an Apparent Magnitude of 9.0 it was too faint to see. This is going to be fun this summer.