Telescope Accessories: Portable Planetariums

Video Transcript

"Now let me show you a couple of exciting new toys for astronomy--kind of the coming thing, if you will--for astronomy, and that is personalized hand-held planetariums. Now what these devices do, as you're standing out in the backyard and you're looking around at all the stars, and you just want to know what you're looking at, if you take one of these devices right here and you hold it up against the night sky, you center the object you're looking at, press the button down, and over here on the LED screen, it will tell you that you're looking at the star Capella. It will tell you what constellation it's in, how far away it is, and if you plug your headphones in, the lady will tell you about that object as well. Very fancy device right here. Also if you're looking for an object, say you want to know where the Andromeda galaxy is, you want to know where M51 is, you enter than into the controller here, and again as you look through the controller, it has little arrows that will guide you to the night sky. The arrows kind of get a little bit quicker blinking as you get to the object you're looking for and when you're there... boom, everything lights up to tell you that you're looking now at the object you requested. Here we have the same kind of device. It looks more like a Star Trek phaser, kind of cool in my book, just don't use it on the side of the highway. Again, this will do the same thing as the other item right here. You have two sights right here, you're pointing it at the object you want to see, you pull the trigger here, and you can lower it down and then you wait--and it takes just about a second--and it tells you what object you're looking at. And one of the nice features of this unit right here is that it will also show you a picture on an LED screen of what you're looking at as well. Again, if you want to locate an object, to find something, you tell the database what you want to see. You can access stars, planets, deep sky objects, Messier objects. You want to know where Messier 12 is, you know that's up in the sky, you don't know where to reference it, you hit Messier 12, you hold this out at arm's length and the arrows will guide you to that object. So both have similar features either to locate or identify objects in the night sky. Both have access points where you can plug in a headphone and actually hear the lady talk about many of the objects if it's a bright star, Capella, Vega... it'll tell you that Vega is in the constellation Vira, that there are double stars nearby, and just kind of give you the highlights of that object. Again, very cool devices. Also, which each device it's proprietary to the manufacturer, but they both make devices that you can plug them in to your GoTo telescopes, so if you have a GoTo scope, as opposed to using the hand controller, if you want to take this device, point it up here, pull the trigger and point it at Saturn, your scope will move to that object as well. Again, very fancy devices here, and we'll give you a little bit of a closeup of this guy. Now I've had opportunities to use both these devices, and I like both of them really well. But I got to tell you, having the LED screen here in the back is very cool, especially for beginning astronomers. So I've asked it to go to Saturn, and now I've got a bright big picture of Saturn right there on the screen. There's actually a few more you can slew through. Again this is handy for deep sky objects, because while the objects will take you to the Whirpool galaxy, to the Ring Nebula, lets say, you can't see those with the naked eye. So this unit will actually show you a nice Hubble photograph of that object as well to give you an idea of what you're looking at. Just kind of helps make the item a little bit more personable. Both these units are under four hundred bucks. They are very fancy and they are the coming thing in astronomy, and just some tools you might want to consider for fun."