Home > Consumer Reviews > Celestron SkyScout Personal Planetarium

I've been through three of these and not one of them did anything right. They are absurdly sensitive to magnetic fields (I began to worry the minute I saw that it came with battery shields. Sheesh). The buttons are randomly responsive; on one occasion I could not scroll to the right in the display for around ten minutes, then all of a sudden it decided to move again. When the GPS tells a New Yorker he's in the Florida Keys, he can try entering the coordinates by hand, but they don't stay set. You never know where Sky Scout will think it is. Celestron suggested that I try different batteries, which I did, but who are they kidding? You'd be better off to hire my twelve year old son as a guide. At least he knows that Sirius is not in Auriga.

it worked great. i just wish i had known which way was the front before it got too dark to see. at first i was spotting my eyes instead of the stars. i recommend learning which way to point it before the sun sets.

I too am disappointed with this product, despite my high hopes. I found the same problems as others have already posted on Amazon.

I suggest that you wait for the improved product. I'm sure Celestron has read these reviews and is working on improving device. They must know how many sales they have lost from all these negative postings.

At $400 for a toy, uh, tool, I will wait for a better product.

Did not work right out of the box. GPS error. I would have sent it back anyway as soon as I saw it was made in China. I try very hard not to buy products made in China and thank you Amazon for the refund. The refund process took a lot less time then getting through to Celestron tech support, which I think was also in Chinese. The guy was definitely not speaking English. I also cancelled the telescope I ordered from them. Chinese junk, pure and simple.

I am not an astronomy buff or anything like that but I love to sit outside on a dark night and look at the stars. I really thought this would be fun and interesting but I wasn't impressed at all. The huge, enormous, gigantic flaw in this is that the viewing is not magnified at all. When I tried to check on a star I could see clearly, it was very hard to find it again looking through the scope - I kept drifting to the same brighter stars over and over. This would've worked much, much better if it had a 2x or 3x magnification which should be trivial to do. One note is that I am very near-sighted and wear very strong glasses so that might have been a factor.

My other comment is "so what"? Even when I could find things clearly or pointed randomly and listened to the information it was not especially interesting. I find a simple Peterson's Guide to the Northern Sky or something like that to be much more interesting.

If this cost $50 or so I could see keeping this as an occasional toy. However for almost $200 it is being returned. As usual, Amazon is great about taking it back.