December 9, 2007 Archive Entries: I found my ring!!!, The Astronomy Space Gun

« Sunday, December 9, 2007 »

The Astronomy Space Gun - The Meade mySKY

So this was a cool item I saw at REI the other day when I was looking at GPS units. Its a gun you point up at the night sky and it calculates where you are, the direction you're facing and what angle the gun is tilted at and lights up it's display and tells you what you are looking at (with a picture too).

Unfortunately, it was daytime and I couldn't use it. The one I saw was the Meade mySKY Personal Guide for Sky Exploration, this might just be something I need. This is the Official Meade site for the mySky (with some video)

it can identify 30,000 unique items
500 audio descriptions to keep you well briefed
built in GPS receiver
2 inch wide 480 x 234 LCD
Sandy Wood (from StarDate) is who narrates the sky for you
interfaces with some Meade telescopes
looks like a space gun / phaser

Popular Mechanics gave it a great review. But a lot of the people reviewing these seem to have them dead out of the box or problems getting the GPS to "lock". The ones who it worked for absolutely love them. Possible other problems: Waving a gun around outside or trying to get it through airport security. And for some reason you can only update it on a Windows machine (via an SD card).

The Celestron SkyScout Personal Planetarium seems to be a similar product, but it's not as cool looking but it's a year older and I think they've worked some of the bugs out. Many of the SkyScout complaints seemed to also be with getting the GPS to "lock".

And. of course, there is s chart to compare the mySky and SkyScout.

PLEASE Leave comments (or trackbacks/pings)
Posted by Gary on Sunday at 12:42 PM on December 9, 2007.
Related categories: handheld, science
Gary Said... http://garysaid.com/

I found my ring!!!

I found it! The ring I got in Costa Rica was buried in my luggage! I was showing Mark the cool features of my new security backpack and out it popped.

It wasn't even anything very fancy, it was just one that I liked. I picked it up at a store in Jaco called Guajira, the word Guajira means a few different things so I'm not sure what the name means, they're right on the main strip so you can't really miss it.

As I said before, it was the only souvenir that I had picked up (besides my peanuts) so I was extra disappointed that it hadn't even make it home. So I've been wearing that this weekend so I'm a happy camper :)