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.

Comments

Re:Now we know

[jdbartlett]

I think this is a nice, if expensive, toy for people in big cities. Even in small cities, light polution dims the view.

I've a friend back in London who had her ceiling painted with a mock-up of the night sky somewhere in Africa. She hired some company that specializes in glow-in-the-dark night sky displays working from real star maps.

I doubt this box is much more expensive.

No planetarium matches the real night sky

[dpbsmith]

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.