Discovery Exclusive Ultimate Star Childrens Planetarium | List Price: $79.95
Discount Price: $55.97
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Brand: Discovery Channel
Binding: Toy
Features: - Project 88 constellations; 12 celestial objects, including 8 planets, Pluto and its moon, Charon
- Uses super bright bulbs to project over 600 stars
- Searchable database with over 600 star facts and myths
- Interactive talking computer and backlit navigational screen
- Dimensions: 13.75" L x 15" W x 13.5" H
Educational [Posted on 2006-12-28]
I bought this for my 8 year old. Overall, I felt the quality was pretty good. Everything worked as advertised. On the positive side, the interactive screen is great. My daughter can look up facts about the constellations including origin myths, star types, distances, as well as a large glossary of defined terms. She can also project the current night sky on the ceiling for our location and time, as well as for other locations throughout the world. The controls are intuitive and easy to learn. She enjoys the sound effects.
On the negative side, all the stars look about the same size and brightness on the projection, not variable as the advertisement would have you believe. Thus, those who are familiar with the night sky may have a tough time differentiating constellations when mixed in with bright backround stars. Also, the field of view does not have any indication of direction(N,S,E,w) to help in locating stars outside. The planet images were not very sharp. Finally, the image of the constellation on the screen does not always match the star patterns projected, as very dim stars are not reproduced on the projection.
Overall, I think this is a good product, but a bit pricey. Based on my research before purchasing, I don't think a better home planetarium is available in this general price range. However, for learning the constellations, I think a computer based program like Stellarium is better. To my daughter, this scored a 100% on the "gee whiz" factor. Of note- my 6 and 4 year olds lost interest pretty quickly as the descriptions are tailored toward a more mature child(I'd say 8-14 year old)
Amazing Star Planetarium [Posted on 2007-03-16]
Well, specially designed to children and adults too. Option to watch constellation is very spectacular. I live in Chile, near Santiago, Don't have for Santiago, but is possible realize adjust with the time in Buenos Aires. The special difference with other, is proyection system with light points, not like many which have dark point. This original system is in concordance with reality.(Star are light points, not dark point in the Sky).
Fernando Franco Blu
Rancagua, CHILE.
not as cool as it sounds [Posted on 2007-04-07]
I got this for my eight year old son for Christmas. We thought it would be soooo cool, turning his bedroom into a starscape each night, picking out constellations, and learning some astronomy. Sadly, it just wasn't that cool.
When you take it out of the box, it has a great precision instrument look. You can simply plug it in and begin playing with it within 2 minutes-- minimal set up or reading of instructions, altho parental input is required. It has a neat timer on it that allows you to pick out a date so you can project what the stars look like at different times of year. You can even pick different countries and get their skyscape! Also, the device has a timer, so it will automatically turn off after kids fall asleep, which is nice.
The big downer is that every point of light is identical in size, shape and color. So, unlike in reality, the North Star is not brighter than the surrounding stars. This makes all the stars kind of run together in one big mess, making it extremely difficult to identify any constellations, which was the whole point of the toy! Add that to the fact that my son's bedroom doesn't happen to have a dome shaped ceiling (!), so there is distortion in the projection as well. After 2-3 nights we, simply gave up an trying to identify any constellations, and instead used it as a very expensive night light.
Overall love it, disappointed in one thing [Posted on 2007-07-17]
We bought this for our 3 year old daughter to go to sleep with, knowing she will get a ton of educational use out of it when she becomes older. She loves it. She has already started to learn the names of the planets. Every night before we go to bed she ask me to swith the planet to saturn. Then right before I go out she always ask me to change it back to the moon. The only thing I have found so far that I am disappointed with is that when you choose a sky (location and time) that the moon does not go to that type of moon, its always full. When its a half moon outside it would be nice to have the moon on the computer do the same thing. That way the sky is really the same, not just the stars. Overall though, we love it.
Inaccurate! [Posted on 2008-12-26]
We bought one of these, but had to return it because the stars were rising in the west and setting in the east. The replacement model, which the company claimed to have checked, did the same thing. While the stars were in their correct locations, making it appear that the earth was turning backwards was ridiculous!
(And yes, I'm sure it was reversed -- I'm a science teacher, and I even had an astrophysics professor double-check for me.)
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