I asked dozens of people “what did you see at CES that you’d spend your own money on?” I also asked “what was the coolest thing you saw?”

Most people stammered on both answers, but yesterday I started hearing about the Celestron SkyScout so Buzz, Shel, and I went over to the Sands to check it out.

It wins my award for the single coolest thing I saw at the show. By far. I’m not alone, either. Shel and Buzz were both speechless when they saw it.

What is it?

Well, for that I asked the inventor, Mike Lemp about it. Here’s a picture of Mike with Shel holding a SkyScout.

Mike and his team has been working on this for five years. It is a revolutionary product. One that you’ll want the first time you play with it. I’m buying one.

So, what is it?

It’s a $400 box with a lens that you look through.

It comes out in April. Order it on Amazon. But do it soon. Amazon has sold dozens and the hype hasn’t yet started on this thing.

So, why am I spending my 400 bones on this thing?

Here’s why.

You look through this device at the night-time sky and it tells you what you’re looking at. Oh, it doesn’t need to be night, either.

Celestron is a famous maker of telescopes (I sold a truckload of their product in the Silicon Valley camera store I used to manage and they always made great products).

It has GPS, gravity, and magnetic field sensors to detect where it’s going.

But it just gets better from there. You can tell it “show me the cool stuff in the sky right now.” It’ll take you on a tour and show you how to point the device with a series of LED’s in the viewfinder.

But it gets cooler than that. It has an audio guide that tells you what you’re looking at and gives you some facts about it.

Oh, wait, there’s more! You hook it up to your computer via USB and it does even more! (Sorry, Windows only for now).

This is going to revolutionize astronomy. It is simply the coolest thing I’ve seen lately (and I’ve seen some pretty cool stuff walking around CES).

What do you think? I can’t wait to go out with Patrick on a dark night and play around.