Meade intros mySKY Personal Planetarium
It may not let you take deep space photographs, but Meade's new mySKY Personal Planetarium should help to give you a better sense of your cosmic environs, and also double as a suitable ray gun prop in your next no-budget sci-fi movie. To keep things simple, Meade's thankfully packed some GPS capabilities into the device, which should keep it properly aligned at all times with no input needed from you. Those GPS capabilities can also be extended to any Meade AutoStar-enabled telescope, with the mySKY doubling as a control unit for the telescope. In either configuartion, the device will let you find and identify more than 30,000 astronomical objects, displaying all the relevant information on its 480 x 234 LCD. You'll need to be fairly serious about your backyard astronomy to consider one of these though, with it set to demand a hefty $400 when it's released next month.
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Aaron @ Apr 9th 2007 4:37PM
Wow, that picture looks straight out of the 80s. Radical, dude.
trev @ Apr 9th 2007 4:42PM
So you need to stand in your back yard and wave a gun shaped object around? Great! ;)
js @ Apr 9th 2007 4:59PM
Can this pass through airport security?
blore40 @ Apr 11th 2007 2:29PM
30,000? Them stars they all look alike. "This one at 30° N is oongaboona major and that one over at 22° W is ipsodelto facto minor"
William Jirovsky @ Apr 13th 2007 6:54PM
I can't believe it only took Meade 2 years to come out with another SkyScout.
A color screen? 30,000 objects? That took two years? This has bust written all over it.
This is the best you can do Meade? And please do yourself a favor and fire your industrial designer.
Besides, I have heard rumblings that Celestron is getting ready to release another SkyScout after Xmas. I am holding out to see whats on tap.
Once again it seems like Meade has missed the boat.
I have a few Meade scopes, and trust me when I say that Meade is not gonna be able to make this happen without some major product malfunctions that there industry worst customer service will not be able to handle. Stick to Scopes Meade. Leave the Technology and innovation to the others.
Engadget Rocks!!!!
split.second @ Feb 1st 2008 1:47AM
wow, ground breaking technology. too bad celestron has something called the Sky Scout already. as far as i can tell the only difference is the LCD screen
i can't imagine spending 400$ on either of these though, when you could buy a decent telescope for that much that will give you a much better view of things.
Primus @ Apr 9th 2007 5:59PM
I got to use the SkyScout extensively this weekend. It's a very VERY nice piece of hardware, but it does have a couple of flaws. It's quite large and bulky for a one-hand device, and really needs a camcorder strap or the like to help you hang on to it. Also, its control buttons take a lot of force to push, much more than it should.
This Meade mySKY, at least from this early look, seems like it handles the grip-issue much better than the SkyScout. And the mySKY does have one more huge difference over the SkyScout. The SkyScout does not have the control unit possibilities the mySKY does. The SkyScout is an independent device only. mySKY seems like a point-and-click goto device with the extra multimedia functions built in.
Teranko @ Sep 17th 2008 6:23PM
MySky is the cheapest piece of junk I've purchased to date. It tipped over whilst going through the standard "calibration" mode at startup and broke due to its poor weight distribution. I called Meade who told me this is happening so often, they are now refusing to repair it even at the owners cost. Now I have a $435 boat anchor. I'll never buy another Meade product again.