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PatinaPete
·On the chance we have some astro folks here, I wanted to register my shock at hearing this news, albeit a little late. A video on YouTube happened across my doom-scroll last night of a guy lamenting the abrupt shutdown of Orion, and along with it their other brands Meade and Coronado. I got into telescope in the 90s. Started collecting gear in the mid 90s and really got into astrophotography in the late 90s early 2000s. I had a nice investment in Takahashi, William Optics, Meade and Konus scopes, SBIG cameras, and the requisite hardware and software skills to bring it all together. I lost some vision in my right eye doing sunspot observations on the day the Columbia mission failed over Texas. Ultimately I gave up the hobby after a neck injury and was unable to correctly get into the necessary positions to do scope alignments.
The loss of Orion is not minor, it's HUGE. This was perhaps the largest company producing pro-am telescopes in the world, at least by name. People's orders are stuck, repairs are stuck, returns are stuck, websites are gone, socials are deleted. This was a total evaporation of a company and all its component parts. It was done so impolitely and so improperly it's hard to imagine. One story circulating is of a fellow who returned the bucket of his $25,000 dobsonian for servicing 2 weeks before the sudden closure. He has no idea where his mirror is. He's out .. 7K?
I fell in love with my crappy Konus reflector and immediately upgraded to a Meade schmidt-cassegrain. That was the jumping off point for a new mount, new camera, new control box, new new new new everything!
Shocking loss to the telescope community. I leave the thread with one of my favorite astro photos, M42 from my backyard in Miami. This is relatively untouched and consists of 100 stacked frames shot over 2 nights. I did remove distorted frames, and of course aligned and processed for my color wheel.
The loss of Orion is not minor, it's HUGE. This was perhaps the largest company producing pro-am telescopes in the world, at least by name. People's orders are stuck, repairs are stuck, returns are stuck, websites are gone, socials are deleted. This was a total evaporation of a company and all its component parts. It was done so impolitely and so improperly it's hard to imagine. One story circulating is of a fellow who returned the bucket of his $25,000 dobsonian for servicing 2 weeks before the sudden closure. He has no idea where his mirror is. He's out .. 7K?
I fell in love with my crappy Konus reflector and immediately upgraded to a Meade schmidt-cassegrain. That was the jumping off point for a new mount, new camera, new control box, new new new new everything!
Shocking loss to the telescope community. I leave the thread with one of my favorite astro photos, M42 from my backyard in Miami. This is relatively untouched and consists of 100 stacked frames shot over 2 nights. I did remove distorted frames, and of course aligned and processed for my color wheel.
