Orion Telescopes & Binoculars


Orion Telescopes & Binoculars is an American retail company that sells telescopes, binoculars and accessories online and in-store for astronomy and birdwatching. It was founded in 1975 and has corporate offices in Watsonville, California with a retail store in Cupertino, California. A large proportion of its products are manufactured by the Chinese company Synta for the Orion brand name. Orion Telescopes & Binoculars ships its products to the United States and over 20 other countries. Orion puts out a semi-quarterly mail-order catalog as well as email catalogs. The company is a prominent advertiser in North American astronomy magazines such as Sky & Telescope and Astronomy.

History

In 1975, Orion Telescopes & Binoculars was founded in a garage in Santa Cruz, California by Tim Gieseler, who served as its only president and CEO.
Between the mid-1990s and 2005, Orion only sold binoculars, telescopes, and accessories under the "Orion" brand.
In January 2005, Orion was acquired by Imaginova, the U.S. conglomerate founded in 1999 by CNN business anchor Lou Dobbs. Orion then began to sell non-Orion brand products, such as Tele Vue eyepieces and even Celestron and Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes.
In November 2017, Orion was repurchased by its employees, and has remained independent and American-owned ever since.

Products

Orion sells a range of telescopes that they characterize as "beginner", "intermediate" or "advanced", including Newtonians, Maksutovs, Schmidt-Cassegrains, Ritchey-Chrétiens and refractors with or without a variety of mounts. Orion also sells a series of Dobsonian telescopes that come in "Classic" and "IntelliScope" versions, the latter with upgraded accessories and the ability to indicate astronomical objects to the observer aided by a computerized object database. Orion also sells Dobsonians with GoTo and tracking capabilities.
In late 2005 Celestron announced an agreement that would allow Celestron 8, 9.25, and Schmidt-Cassegrain optical tube assemblies, painted in metallic gray and using the "Orion" brand, to be sold with Orion branded German equatorial mounts and eyepiece accessories.
At the high performance end of their range, Orion has a series of two element apochromatic refractors manufactured by Synta featuring "extra low dispersion" fluorite crown glass in one element of the objective lens. These are marketed as the ED80, ED100 and ED120.
Orion also sells binoculars for astronomical and terrestrial observing, microscopes and monocular spotting scopes of the type used by birdwatchers and marksmen.