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HomeStar - 21st Century Home Planetarium Review
Jeff writes "Direct from Japan, the SegaToys HomeStar is a unique home projector that turns any room into a planetarium, giving a clear view of the night sky. Using interchangeable plates, it's capable of displaying up to 10,000 stars of either northern or southern hemisphere, as well as their constellations. The starfield can move on a timer to simulate the earth's rotation. Also comes with a meteor generating function and sleep timer. Makes a great gift for the dad who has everything, or people who live in light-polluted areas." Check out Jeff's review of the unit.
Wow, I guess there really are people that absolutely hate to go outside and also manage to have a decent source of income. How else do we explain this? :)
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
And you can view samples of what it generates here.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Well, I can see Andromeda, but Orion looks like he's being eaten by some Linux or something...
That's bupkis!
And that's the end of my show! DONK!
-Peter
which is a bear of a drive. :)
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
/reads HomeStar name...
(Must not make Homestar Runner joke. Must not make Homestar Runner joke.)
Hmm, the warning label says: Do not look into lens when activated. Burnination of retinas may occur.
(Oh, bloody hell!)
This sig intentionally left blank.
I prefer the Homstar Projector.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
You go girl - buck that digital trend!
Direct from Japan...
All the way across the Pacific Ocean, huh? Far out man, that's EXOTIC!
This guy's the limit!
How much money do we spend, how much air pollution, acid rain, and global warming do we create so that we can light up the bellies of birds? It is possible to have development that does not rob us of our heritage and right to enjoy the night sky. International Dark Sky Association
Cause, you know, you gotta turn the lights off to use it ...
After reading up and correctly identifying every constellation in both the northern and southern hemispheres, I was kidnapped and transported against my will to the Credence system where I was then press ganged into service for the Unitarians as the so-called "Last Starfighter". It was a harrowing experience; I barely defeated their leader, Xenu, in a last-ditch attack with the Yellow Submarine's emergency weapon system, "Mortal Flower". After a long, boring awards ceremony, I was transported back to Earth. Nobody believed me when I told them my tale, of course, because I had been on acid at the time.
I do not recommend this product.
Did anyone else read the headline as, "Direct from Japan, the SexToys HomeStar..."?
It's too early in the morning...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I've seen these type of setups before and while impressive they just don't hold a candle to the real thing. I was amazed when I went out on a ship in the middle of the pacific and looked up. You can't imagine how many stars and stuff you can see when you don't have anything else around but the ocean. Ever since then I've been less than impressed with these at home versions :[
I imported one of these a while ago. Excellent unit. Great for teaching. Also gives an awesome effect in the living room at night time when it's too rainy to go out :) /starnut
There exists some positive integer N that you are the Nth person to read this signature.
Also comes with a meteor generating function...
Profit!
The site doesn't really seem to be down right now, 25 minutes after you posted, but it does still suck.
For anyone who goes looking for TFA later, if/when it gets slashdotted, don't worry, you're missing nothing - the quote provided by the parent post is one of the best and most telling sections of this "review." That is a description of the product from "the official Homestar website, (translated through Babelfish)."
Another important fact the reviewer shares is: "Shaking the sphere doesn't cause any rattling."
That's what we need. A monkey reviewing a shiny ball with "soothing curves." WTF?
"I'm not gonna lie to you, that's a healthy piece of real estate!"
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Homestarrunner reference.
The original Japanese description actually more accurately translates to:
..and probably something about "Kawaii neko-chan"
"Oh my god, Its full of stars!"
Unfortunately, I've only had perhaps a dozen chances to look at a good, dark sky in my lifetime. But, fortunately, I have had those chances.
It's unreal. Just as it's hard to recognize the constellations from your typical U. S. suburban location, because you see too few stars, under good conditions it become hard to recognize the constellations because you see too many stars. The brighter stars that form the H. A. Rey connect-the-dots diagrams are lost in a sea of stars that look almost as bright.
I had a real "Aha!" moment on one of those occasions.
We've all been brought up to believe that the constellations are connect-the-dots stick-figures. And most of these stick-figures are so lousy that it's hard to believe anyone ever connected them with anything. There are a few exceptions, like Orion. (H. G. Wells wondered why the Christians had allowed the constellations to continue to be named after pagan mythology, and had never reinterpreted them. He figured that in any such interpretation Orion would be Christ...) Sagittarius does have something that perhaps can be seen to resemble a bow. But, mostly, they are a bunch of slightly-out-of-true triangles and boxes.
Well, one night, when the sky was full of, what can I say but stardust, I suddenly had this perceptual shift, like seeing a Necker cube reverse. I didn't see dots. I saw a silvery, stippled texture. And the sparser and denser stipples of starlight looked sort of like clouds. And, just as you see shapes in clouds... not connect-the-dots, stick-figure shapes, but solid, three-dimensional shapes... I saw solid, three-dimensional shapes, sculpted blobs of starry fog in which I thought I could see animals, and faces, and so forth, just as I can in clouds.
I can't prove it, but I am certain that this is the way the ancients perceived the sky.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I was on a cruise ship, in the middle of the caribbean a few years ago. I thought I would be able to see lots of stars in the sky. However, the boat was decked out with so many strings of overhead lights that the stars were overwhelmed.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
for San Francisco and other fog ridden 'hoods
Does it have a Trogdor constellation?
Many years ago I spent a lot of time volunteering at the Charles Hayden Planetarium in Boston, Mass. (actually I was the Museum of Science volunteer with most hours for several years.)
I did a lot of talking about astronomy, showing off models of spacecraft, helping folks try on spacesuits, etc. I also helped out with the shows, the 3pm one being the live show, "Stars of the Season". In the theater for that show was the lecturer and a guard. The guards were mostly there to help anyone who had to get up in the dark, and to occasionally shush those who couldn't keep quiet and didn't believe us about how sound carries in a domed room.
Back in those days many of the guards assigned planetarium show duty were high-school and college students, most of them from a few families that the museum knew well. It was a great arrangement, we hired whole families of kids, and their friends, they were usually pre-trained by their older siblings who had worked for us, were honest and hardworking, and the friends of theirs we also hired were pressured to be the same. We knew the parents, the parents knew the staff, the kids had great part time jobs and we had great part time staff.
However these families were local, usually meaning Boston, Cambridge, or Somerville Mass. So they were almost universally urban kids who knew the subway system by heart but rarely got out into suburbia much less beyond. This didn't mean much to us 'til one day one of them came into the planetarium off absolutely floored: Our show was real!
He'd stood through it a hundred times, listening to the lecturer, watching the sky shift around, various sights like the Milky Way be pointed out, but it was all "planetarium stuff". Then the weekend before he and a bunch of the other younger guards had gone up north to a lake in New Hampshire for a weekend on partying. That night they'd gone out onto the dock, and been shocked: Stars!
Not the occasional glimmer through the glow back home, but millions, even (yes) bill-yuns! Shining close and bright, the Milky Way a clearly defined river of light, everything like we showed it in the planetarium but which they'd never seen for themselves.
He was astonished, and full of questions: Suddenly it was all real, and exciting, and he was interested!
We were all taken aback, and then saddened when we realized the situation. We were all well familiar with dark skies and seeing our friends the stars and planets, but these were young people who'd never seen a night sky in all of it's glory. There was a whole universe of science and beauty right above them and they'd never, never even had the opportunity, to see it and be inspired by it.
The next summer the Museum did a program about clear skies, but that was 25 years ago and things have only gotten worse. Now many urban buildings are lit from the outside; I remember the night when the "Old Hancock Tower" in Boston's Back Bay was lit and my nearby, nicely nearly dark with small streetlights, South End street became forever bright enough to read a book on all night. The same is true of many cities, lighting the exteriors of buildings all night to show them off, and in the process drowning out the night sky.
I still get to revel in dark skies. Many of my good friends live on mountainsides in Vermont and from there I get to drink it all in every so often, share the stars with friends, get to revisit the skies. But urban kids, outside of field-trip to the planetarium, where it seems all "make believe", they get no stars at all. That's a sad thing.
If you get the chance, know some urban kids, give them a treat: Take them out some night. An hour's drive from downtown, a stop for icecream, then find a big field away from a mall or lit parking lot. Suburban & rural public schools are great for this, especially where playing fields are on the far side of the building from the parking lot. A pair of binoculars is great but not necessary, however sweaters often are (it gets cooold on a clear viewing night). Then start looking up. Let your eyes adjust, find Orion's Belt, then you're off! It's the cost of the evening, and a memory the kids will have forever.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
The picture in the review showed the projected stars as having constellation lines drawn on them! It looked terrible. If I want to get the feeling of lying in bed or in my living room and looking up at the stars, I don't want to see big, garish lines drawn across the "sky". Hopefully they have some disks without the lines, but the review didn't mention it.
Years ago I used a kit to put luminous paint on my bedroom ceiling in the pattern of the stars. It was a set of stencils you'd stick to the ceiling and use as a guide to make the star dots. Then when you turned the lights off they'd glow dimly for an hour or more. It was really beautiful, but a lot of work to create.
This is weird. I just bought a device like this at a garage sale. It's made by Bushnell, in the early 80's.
It's probably another one of Strong Bad's get-rich-quick schemes, I bet he's taped Homestar to the ceiling again.... :-\
- Summit of La Palma in the Canary Islands
- Summit of Mauna Kea on Big Island, Hawaii
- Eastern shore of Georgian Bay, Canada
- Plains of the Masai Mara, Kenya
When you do see the stars in all their splendour, you know why the stars were venerated by many civilizations.While the higher you go the better the "seeing", it doesn't follow that the higher you go, the better the view, at least from a human perspective. I found that above 9,000ft, the lack of oxygen degrades my vision. Ergo, the view from the summit of La Palma was better than that from Mauna Kea, despite being almost 5,000ft lower.
And if you can't get out and find a really dark site, you can at least download Stellarium and play with that.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
... actually when I say better, what I really mean is more Sega obsessive... http://www.ukresistance.co.uk/2006/01/segas-homest ar-planetarium-reviewed.html
try out stellarium from sourceforge!!!
the 10,000 stars claim is sort of marketing hype on an average night the sky yields about 2,000 visible stars. I have concerns about the units ability to accurately project the correct star color. I used to work with a major planetarium projector that went to a magnitude of 6.7 which is about 14,000 stars. A xenon lamp illuminated each hemisphere and light was focused and filtered for each star and nebula. The problem with this unit as I see it is it would work well with a domed ceiling. If you have a light fixture in the center of the ceiling that could seriously mess things up as well. This sounds like a fun projector though but a visit to a planetarium will give a more realistic perspective. Better hurry, planetariums are easy targets for budget cutters.