Product of the Day
CES: Unistellar eVscope telescope
At CES last week, Unistellar claimed to provide a new way of stargazing through eVscope telescope. The compact, connected telescope uses light-amplification technology that gives observers a crisp and detailed view of galaxies, nebulae, and comets through its eyepiece. Making the telescope easy to use, it frees users of the need to study constellations or polar-star alignment: instead, they just turn it on, choose the object they want to see on the Unistellar app, and let the telescope find and track the desired object.
“The eVscope is, by far, the most successful space-related crowdfunding project ever,” said Laurent Marfisi, CEO of Unistellar. “It’s vivid proof that the eVscope speaks directly to the pure sense of wonder astronomical observations inspire in human beings. And it further encouraged those of us who work at Unistellar to deliver on the expectations we’ve set, both for ourselves and for the eVscope.”
Click through to read more about Unistellar’s crowdfunding success.
Unistellar’s story is connected to Las Vegas. Two years ago, the startup held some of the earliest demonstrations of the eVscope, then in its proof-of-concept phase, at CES. The massive interest generated during those demos, and others in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, Marseille, and Berlin, helped Unistellar achieve one of the most successful startup campaigns in Kickstarter history. Thanks to this success and the success of a follow-up Indiegogo InDemand campaign targeted at later backers, Unistellar has now raised more than $3-million and will receive an Indiegogo Innovation award for its successful campaign.
CES is also where Unistellar’s citizen-astronomy ambitions got an enormous boost when the company’s founders met Dr Franck Marchis, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute. Dr. Marchis has since joined the start-up as Chief Scientific Officer to develop the company’s citizen-science component. Thanks to a partnership between Unistellar and the SETI Institute, the eVscope’s users will be able to join a large community of observers who contribute to scientific discovery while witnessing special astronomical events like comets, supernovae, and asteroids.
