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George,

Sorry I didn't include any links previously.

First of all, here's a nice article describing the technology of the Celestron Skyscout:
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=198700125
(be sure to continue to the second page of the article).

This is the "niche market" astronomy toy that I was talking about. And here's 
the main Celestron page for the product:
http://www.celestron.com/skyscout/
This thing does just what it says. You take it out of the box, put in the AA 
batteries, turn it on, point it at a star, and it tells you just what you're 
looking at. It requires only a few seconds of automatic initialization. 
There's no user alignment process.

The Skyscout appeared on the market two or three years ago. It's fairly 
expensive, and it can't even make phone calls. :-) As you can see from the 
EEtimes article above, it includes a GPS chipset, two magnetic chipsets, and 
accelerometer chipsets. With the output from those, it can determine where 
you're pointing in the sky from anywhere on Earth at any date and time 
(probably limited to a few decades out for planet positions) with an accuracy 
of about 0.5 degrees. Clearly, as you suggested, if there's significant 
magnetic or acceleration interference (you wouldn't want to use it inside an 
iron carousel), then it would have problems. But I've seen a Skyscout in 
operation and tried it myself. It's not bothered by minor magnetic 
interference and its own batteries are obviously a significant source of 
magnetic field which apparently cause no problems. How? I don't know. But I'm 
more interested in the educational aspects of this than its technology (which 
is OT in any case).

This technology, patented by Celestron (will other companies have to license 
it?) is about to become much more widespread. It can be squeezed into modern 
smart phones without too much trouble. Many phones, including the iPhone, 
already include accelerometers (for games and phone functions -e.g. in one 
phone, if the phone is placed face-down in a call, the caller is put on 
hold). Many phones have standard GPS now. A few days ago, I had the 
experience of parking at a local store and I glanced down at the GPS display 
on my phone. I was running Google Maps so it was showing me a satellite view 
of the parking lot with a little dot marking my position. I laughed because 
it showed me in the third parking spot when I had parked in the second. Then 
I stepped out of the car, looked again, and realized that the phone knew 
where I was better than I did.

The evidence for this magnetic compass technology in the next iPhone release 
appeared over the past few months. From the CNET article:
"Rumors first floated a month ago that there would be a magnetometer built in 
to the next version of the iPhone. Now there appear to be corroborating 
screenshots, which BoyGeniusReport has obtained. The images show a debugging 
menu with the option to "show in compass," that is purportedly going to show 
up when the upgraded iPhone debuts. 

One of the interesting things you can do with a digital compass is introduce 
augmented reality-type applications, as MacRumors suggests. Mobile augmented 
reality can use a phone's camera and compass to let a device capture an image 
of a location, like San Francisco's Union Square, for example. Information 
from the compass would allow names of locations to pop up on top of the 
image. 

While this would be new for the iPhone and for Apple, others (like Nokia) have 
been working on this exact type of mobile application for several years. HP 
Labs has also looked at the usefulness of mobile augmented reality. 

A digital compass also allows for the iPhone to catch up to the G1's 
capability of doing Google Maps in "compass mode." In the Street View mode, 
as you move the phone around, so does the view of the map."
(that's most of the text --the original web page loads very slowly)

So again, consider the implications for celestial navigation education. Within 
a short period of time, we can expect a significantly larger number of people 
to come to the table with some good star identification skills in hand. It's 
just a matter of time... 

-FER



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