Orion Telescopes & Binoculars

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Orion Telescopes & Binoculars is an American-based retailer of telescopes and astronomy equipment. It operates several retail stores in California as well as an online store and a semi-quarterly mail-order catalog.

The company was founded in 1975 by Tim Johnson, who served as its only president and CEO. Since January, 2005, it has been owned by Imaginova, the U.S. conglomorate founded in 1999 by CNN business anchor Lou Dobbs. Between the mid-1990's and 2005, Orion only sold telescopes and acessories under the "Orion" brand, but since the Imaginova acquisition, Orion has started to sell Tele Vue eyepieces, Celestron 8 and 11-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes, as well as the familiar Orion-branded items, including 90mm (3.1 inch) to 7-inch Maksutov-Cassegrain telescopes and 80 to 120mm apochromatic (color-free) refractor telescopes.

In late 2005, Imaginova and Celestron, the latter fresh out of an out-of-court settlement with rival Meade over "go-to" telescope technology, announced an agreement that would allow Celestron 8, 9.25, and 11-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain optical tube assemblies, painted in metallic gray and using the "Orion" brand (Celestron OTAs are painted either gloss black or semi-gloss matte orange), to be sold with Orion German equatorial mounts and eyepiece acessories. The new Orion XT-12 Classic Dobsonian telescope, introduced in 2006, uses the same BK-4 optical glass primary mirror as Celestron's "Starhopper 12" Dobsonian, but with the XT Classic Dobsonian mount design and with two 1¼" Plössl eyepieces (the Celestron telescope come with only a single 2-inch diameter Plössl eyepiece). Recently, Orion retooled their Dobsonians (both the "Classic" and "IntelliScope" versions, the latter with a 15,000+ object database computer), with right-angle finderscopes (which give a correct-view image as seen in star maps and with the human eye) and "crayford"-style focusers in place of the old-style "rack and pinion" (tooth & gear) focusers. This allowed Orion to compete against Meade, who, in 2006, introduced the LightBridge truss-tube Dobsonian telescope which has a crayford focuser and, in place of a traditional finderscope, uses a "red dot" reflex sight with several reticle adjustments.