The owner of this website presents a new 6 inch Dobsonian
telescope to the Science Faculty of Greer Middle School
Hi my name is
Rick Boozer, welcome to my website that I call
Singularity Scientific.
Those of you who have visited this web site before will notice that this welcome page has been changed. The first thing you will notice via the
photo above is that I have donated yet another telescope to a school. The above presentation took place on April 6, 2005 at Greer Middle School in
Greer, South Carolina.
Before I continue with the latest news, here is a description of my original plan for those who are new to this website:
to promote interest in astronomy, space, and science education in general. Please note that this website represents the efforts of single
individual and not a formal tax exempt organization.
The plan to accomplish the above stated purpose consisted of two
parts:
a) The
development of useful educational science software and device plans
that will be available for download free of charge from
this website! More new things were to be added as the owner of the site
completed development of them.
b) I had hoped that the
funding of scientific education efforts of the website could be done through online donations. These
efforts have included: the costs of running this website, various educational
astronomical research projects, and other educational science activities
for the public.
Having got all of that out of the way, now I would like to tell you what happened during 2004 that relates to this website.
First, many of you will remember that I initiated a competition wherein I expected faculty or parents to nominate their school for the donation
of a free high quality (that is, NOT cheap department store variety) telescope. You can see the particulars of that competition
here. I don't know
why (maybe most people think I'm some kind of scam artist), but I did not receive even one entry at the e-mail address that was specified for the contest!
I didn't even get any curious inquiries!
I do know its NOT because this website has low traffic. I average around 75 to 100 sessions (not hits, I get several times that number of hits) per day!
Indeed, it is not unusual for the number of sessions to breach the 150 mark. Thats relatively high volume for a site such as this.
Well, another school's loss was Greer Middle School's gain. When I got no entries by the end
of January 2005, I started looking for a worthy local school on whom to bestow one of the new telescopes that were still sitting unassembled in my
basement. (To see the original page about my first telescope donation, click here.)
When Chris Elliott of Greer Middle School expressed an interest in a
donation, I assembled one of the six inch Dobs and gave it to her
school.
I still have one more six inch Dobsonian telescope left. I will
search for another worthy school.
Not only did I not receive any inquiries from schools for free
equipment, I have not received any donations to help fund this
website and its associated activities in the over one year I have been
set up to accept such donations. Lots of people have downloaded my
original free software and read the online book (still a work in
progress, though most of it has been written) and continue to do so.
Therefore, any future donations of equipment by me will be limited to
about one telescope a year at most, since I must pay for them out of my
personal income and I also now have more personal expenses than I used
to.
I guess I will continue to improve this website with new science
education resources, though not at the rate I would have had the user's
of the website been generous. As I said, perhaps people thought I
wasn't on the level.
Rick Boozer can be contacted
here.