If you want to see into infinity and beyond, home telescopes typically don’t have the same power as scientist’s machines.
But one company has risen to the forefront of attention for providing an at-home solution for wannabe stargazers.
The eVscope is a unique and efficient telescope that’s an impressive 100 times more powerful than a classical telescope.
Let’s find out more…
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What’s the Unisteller eVscope?
Crafted by the founders of Unistellar, Laurent Marsifi and Arnaud Malvache, the eVscope is a crowd-sourced product.
Its patent-pending technology absorbs light over short periods of time, combining with algorithms programmed into the machine to produce an image amplified to 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio, resulting in vivid and clear pictures.
And, unlike some telescopes, it does the work automatically.
The settings adjust themselves for ease of viewing, allowing anyone to peer up at the night sky and see all its glory without having to fiddle with knobs and buttons.
eVscope Special Features
Self-Orienting
If that wasn’t enough to win over some buyers, the eVscope also uses Autonomous Field Detection, patent pending.
The high accuracy sky-recognition technology automatically detects the stars in its view and orients itself among the 20 million stars recorded in its database.
It can accurately identify what collection of stars or planets the viewer is looking at, and then sends the contextual information for it straight to the user’s smartphone.
The additional technical advancements of the product, such as an internal computer, intelligent image processing, and it’s easy-to-handle 15.4 pounds when compacted weight puts the eVscope above the rest.
The eVscope has developed in partnership with the SETI Institute a campaign mode to create a database of collected info.
Whenever an astrological event is scheduled to happen, users’ smartphones will notify them of it and request their observance.
The user doesn’t even need to struggle to find the direction to point the eVscope; it will align itself towards the event and connect with a vast network of other eVscope citizen scientists.
In doing so, Unistellar hopes to contribute to scientific research, meaning budding astrologists can help study and observe the sky they love.
High Levels of Connectivity
It’s the ability to connect with users’ smartphones via internal Wi-Fi and Bluetooth that makes the eVscope more than just a top-end product.
In the day and age where everything and everyone is connected to each other via the internet, this telescope is no different. Users can employ their smartphone and eVscope together to become citizen scientists.
With their phone connected to the Control App, users can wirelessly control the eVscope. Users can choose between two modes of use, the first being beginner mode, with which the telescope will use automatic alignment procedures to orient itself to the object the users choose on the app.
From there, users can save pictures and videos as well as add their own information to the database. More experienced stargazers can choose expert mode and program everything manually.
Bringing the Product to the Masses
The eVscope is not yet on the market, despite it winning awards such as an CES innovation award in January 2017.
However, the long journey to bring the telescope to everyone’s home is almost over. The idea for a telescope better than the others arose in 2015 and the path to now has been steadily filled with advancements for the final eVscope.
The prototype was built in the laboratory in 2015, after the algorithms for the image processing was finished, and the business plan and design concept were finalized in November 2016. The following months garnered partnership with both the SETI Institute and bpiFrance.
Its technology debuted last summer in demonstrations up and down both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and garnered enough attention to fund its Kickstarter well past the $150,000 they asked for.
The company’s goal is to use the crowd-funded money to further develop their pre-series prototypes, beta-testing, and eventually fund mass production.
The money will enable the company to make their product more hardy and easy to use, as well as finish construction on the Control App. The Kickstarter fund closes on November 23rd, 2017 and following that, they will finish construction on the eVscope.
If all the pre-series and beta testing goes well, the eVscope will be available to purchase sometime in November 2018.
Excited buyers can continue to donate to the Kickstarter until its closing date, and certain amounts of pledges can receive eVscopes and tripods the moment they’re in production.
The more generous pledgers can receive eVscopes signed by astronomer Jill Tarten. Membership to the citizen scientists community is also available after the right donation amount is given.
With the eVscope, Unistellar has imagined a telescope more adapted to today’s society and far more advanced than other similar products. It’s new technology that hopes to rise above other telescopes, and with its dedicated production team, it has.
