Designer Hyunsik Moon caught our attention with a very strange electric vehicle concept. The Zodiac Stargazer puts up to two passengers in an astronomical telescope on wheels that rotates and faces directly upwards, thus giving an extraordinary window on the universe.
It’s not a real car, it’s a design study that Moon is using as his first-semester project for his master of arts in transportation design at the University of Pforzheim in Germany. moon sees it as a way to somehow democratize astronomy by allowing people to rent such vehicles and thus enter the silent desert at night, and then look at the stars through a far more powerful telescope to look up at the stars.
All you basically have to do is flip open the lens cover and jump in, climb into the telescope tube when the telescope is horizontal and sit in the back of the capsule. Presumably, the thing would autopilot to the user’s chosen observing location, thus avoiding the person inside driving with the world’s thickest glasses on. Presumably, it would drive very slowly. When the destination is reached, the whole carriage will be tilted back until the person inside lies down and looks up, then the telescope tube will be extended and let the “smart lens” focus on the night sky.
It is certainly a lovely thought that as long as there have been humans, we have been looking up at the stars, dreaming, imagining, trying to glimpse the scale and richness of the universe beyond our fragile blue marble.
