When I was a young lad I developed an interest in astronomy. The problem was I lived in Salford in the UK and it was always either raining or the skies were too cloudy at night to actually see the constellations reliably – so I took up model aeroplane building instead.

If only one of these home planetariums (planetaria?) was available when I was growing up; I could have been the next Steven Hawking.

 The HomeStar planetarium can project over 10,000 stars onto your ceiling at a distance of around 2 metres. The stars can rotate anti-clockwise to represent the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise for those of you in the Southern Hemisphere.

The constellations are loaded with different “Starry disks” and are projected using a high brightness, white LED. It can even be set to show shooting stars at random intervals.

It comes with a built in timer, so you can leave it on in the kids’ bedroom when they go to sleep.

At $229 it’s not too expensive but if your not yet convinced you can see a video of the HomeStar planetarium working here (in Japanese). 

The HomeStar planetarium from Toys.brando.com.hk.