Home > Consumer Reviews > Celestron SkyScout Personal Planetarium

I haven't bought this yet, but I e-mailed the Celestron Tech Service about the flaws I had read about in these amazon reviews. They replied with,

"Battery life varies with usage. It has a range from 4-8 hours. More locating and identifying will use more batteries.
Magnetic interference has nothing to do with the GPS. GPS works pretty much anywhere in the world, as long as you have a clear sky overhead.
The magnetic interference issue is relative. If you have many powerlines, or are around large metallic objects or electrical junction boxes, then the magnetic sensors will most likely be affected. Most of the time simply moving a few feet away will remedy any issue.
Any crashes or shutdowns due to the firmware were remedied with an online upgrade months ago, and are no longer an issue.
Yes, the SkyScout will shut down after five minutes. This is to conserve battery life when not in use. It will prompt you with a message telling you that it will shut down in a few seconds, and allow you the option to not shut down."

I just got my new SkyScout and decided to update the firmware using the Update utility. What a mistake. After 3 sets of batteries and 3 tries I finally got it to take. The first two attempts ended with a "writing to block" error. After such a failure the unit is dead. Both failures occurred at different points during the updating firmware phase. This was after waiting 15 minutes for the download phase to finish on my 8meg broadband connection. The unit is running on battery through entire process (no AC adapter) and the batteries fade fast. And what a pain to change them! You need a screwdriver and a lot of patience to swap them out. I'm surprised that it only uses 2 AA batteries for such power hungry device.

I spoke with Celestron tech support. No help there. By the way, they answered their main phone number with a simple "Hello". I had to confirm that I was actually talking with Celestron. The tech was unfamiliar with the product and needed to talk with someone else. He was supposed to call back in 30 minutes. He never called back. Fortunately I was able to get the unit back running again by myself.

With the exception of the battery and update feature the unit seems well engineered and very easy to use. It quickly acquired the GPS satellites and was up and running fast. I love the cool red backlighting and the audio prompts as well.

Despite the cool features I just can not recommend this unit at this time. The poor customer support, battery and updating issues seem to indicate that Celestron still needs to do more work before the SkyScout is ready for prime time.

The idea is genius - marry a GPS with an accelerometer and create a device that can tell you exactly what star it is pointing at, or direct you to any visible star. And it pretty much works as advertised. We've used ours on several nights so far, and everyone in our extended family has wanted a turn spotting different stars.

The info on the major stars is plentiful. The audio is a nice idea, but it just reads the same information that is on the text display. Sighting can be a little tricky through the plastic tube, but even faint stars took no more than two or three tries to spot.

The precision is good, but not great. If you point to Orion's belt, it's going to list all three stars. You'll have to read the descriptions to determine whether you are interested in the eastern-most, western-most, or middle star. Did you know that the middle star of Orion's belt, Alnilam, is 50% farther away than the other two? Or that Alnitak, the leftmost star in the belt, is primarily a hot blue supergiant star that is 6 million years old and has already begun to die? Those are the kinds of things SkyScout will tell you. Fun stuff.


It is very sensitive to metal - you can't use rechargeable batteries, and it comes with special tubes to you have to put the batteries in. We couldn't use it standing next to a big swing set, for instance. A little symbol pops up on the video screen and it refuses to work.

The software is PC only. No Mac version in the works as of now. We haven't tried running the updater in parallels or VMWare yet. Updates seem fairly rare anyway.

It's a little pricey, but all in all, I really can't find too many negatives about it. It's amazing.

After seeing some of the other reviews which rank it low, I can only imagine they had a bad batch. Mine works flawlessly, aquires a GPS signal within about 1-2 minutes, and I have no problems with magnetic interferance. In terms of battery life, I've used it for about an average of an hour over 5 different nights and I am still on my first set of batteries (regular AA Alkalines). The product is well made, sturdy, and has a solid feel.

My 9 year old daughter has invented a new verb "skyscouting", and we have been "skyscouting" almost every night we've had clear skies and learning more about the night sky more quickly than ever before! She loves the "Identify" mode and enjoys targetting stars. I especially like the constellation image feature and Tonight's Highlights. I did notice that the audio and text descriptions differ slightly so listen/look at both.

I waited a couple months on order before getting mine but was amazed by it. I took it camping in Yosemite and learned so much. It took about a half an hour to really figure out how to work the thing. However, once it was going, I learned a lifetime of astronomy in an hour. I have brought it out on a number of occasions and everyone is always blown away.