Skywatcher Telescopes

Reviews

It's a good educational toy that can be also used as a night light. You can make the moon shade change from no moon to full moon either manually or automatically. The light lasts 30 minutes and turns off automatically. Only negative thing is I'd like to have a switch to make it stay on all night long to use it as a night light when my kid wakes up in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, it turns off after 30 minutes by itself.

I bought this set for by sons' room and they really enjoyed helping put up the stars and telling me where to put the planets! I arranged the planets around the light (SUN) in the center of the ceiling so planets farther away are not quite as bright but still glow. The star stickers are quite small and thin so I did order another set of better quality stars to go along with the set but these smaller stars add to the experience. Overall we all really enjoy it! Great for solar theme bedroom decorations, as well as educational! My older son (10) was telling my younger son (5) the names and facts about each planet as we were hanging them.

i bought this for my toddler son's room. He loves the planets! i used them as a mobile over his crib, they are very entertaining. Before i had them hanging, he would roll and chase the glowing planet all around his room before bed. he thought it was the funniest thing ever!

The product was very heavy and cumbersome for hanging from the thin thread supplied in the package. also two people were needed to put it together in an effort to avoid the thread tangling once the balls are attached.Definitely not worth the money!!!

Kids had Jupiter broken before I got the planets hung up (glued it back together ok though). Better than cardboard cutouts. Only glow for about a minute. Overall I'm satisfied with this product. Good way to learn about the planets. Kids enjoy the process of hanging them and learning about them. WM had it for six bucks cheaper fyi.

Reviews

We bought this set for our 6-year-old son, whose current obsession is everything having to do with Space. The planets look really cool all hung on the ceiling; we tied the attached string to pushpins that we stuck in the ceiling, except the Sun was too heavy so we had to get a little hook that screwed into the ceiling to hang it on instead. The only downside is that the moon and Mars do not inflate all the way and are not completely round. But I think that bothers me more than my son. It would be cooler, too, if they glowed in the dark. However, with that said this is an awesome set that any Space-lover will, well, love.

We bought this set for our 5,5 yo for Christmas. What a disappointment! The pump stopped working withoin 5 minutes, and Neptune had a huge hole in it (impossible to repair). Other planets can not hold enough air to look like little balls (like on the photo). They look sad... When I asked my son if it was okay with him to send it back to Amazon, he didn't mind at all. And this is a boy who is CRAZY about Space and Planets... I personally LOVE Learning Resources company, but this product did not meet our usual expectations. I am sending it back....

we used it as a decoration for my 5 year old boy birthday party, it was outer space theme, he helped us to hang the planets and the sun, he had so much fun!! and then after the party we played with them!!

the product is every colorful and easy to use. The quality of workmanship in not so hot.

I bought these for my boy on his 2nd birthday. They have been the #1 toy in our house for the past 18 months and they didn't start to pop for little over a year after we bought them - and we were very rough with them. Standing today are the smaller planets. So I decided to buy another box to replace them and well, the quality is definitely different - the balls are all smaller than they used to be, by 5% or so. Although the color is still vivid, you can tell there is a difference in quality of the ball. I blew up mars yesterday (using them as potty training gifts) and it's been partially deflating over night . I still had the old box and the packaging did not change. Are they still worth [...] the money? Yes - absolutely. My favorite toy ever.

Reviews

Celestron really needs to catch up with technology. More and more people are running x64 operating systems and more and more people are upgrading from the very poor Vista OS to Windows 7. Celestron has no drivers for either Windows 7 or x64 systems. My camera is now a paper weight until I can find someone to "dump" it on.

I recently bougth a camera and it is not compatible with Windows 7, and CELESTRON people said they don't have the drivers for W7 only for XP (Should i change my computer!!, ja...)- so my camera is in the box on the top of the bookshelf in my house - ít's very expensive to return it since I don't live in the USA. It's a gadget without future technology, in other words it is a waste of time and money.

neximage doesn,t work with windows 7 os. when i pluged in the camara to the usb port windows wouldn,t recognize it so i could download the drivers. i contacted celestron they agreed told me to keep checking their website.

This camera is not compatible with Windows Vista 64 bit operating system. If you're running 32 bit Vista you're fine except you have to download and install the new driver. I'll gladly sell you mine. It's never been used.

I used the NexImager with my Celestron 130 SLT. It was very good for moon viewing but it struggled a bit with the planets. For example, I found that viewing Saturn through a normal eyepiece produced a better and sharper image than using the NexImage. Also the CCD resolution of 640x480 is low in this day when megapixel CCD's are commonplace even in low price cameras. My unit also produced a fair amount of noise when viewing a dark sky. But it is fun to play with and given it's low price, it is worth having. A more expensive and useful add-on would be to make it wireless to avoid the cable that runs from the telescope to your PC. As a side note, I'm using the NexImage with a Macintosh Macbook laptop. Though the software is written for a PC, I am using it fine via VMWare Fusion hosting a Windows XP OS.