There was a time when building a telescope was a rite of passage for budding astronomers, much as building a radio was the coming age for electronics folks. These days, many things are cheaper to buy than build, even though we do enjoy building anything we can. Orion was a big name in telescopes for many years. Their parent company also owned Meade and Coronado, both well-known optical brands. A recent video from [Reflactor] brought it to our attention that Orion abruptly ceased operations on July 9th.
We always hate to hear when well-known brands that serve a big part of our community vanish. According to [Reflactor], people who have telescopes with the company for repair are likely to never see them again. [Dylan O’Donnell] also had a video about it (see below), and, as he notes, at that time, the website was still operating, but it’s gone now. To add further fuel to the fire Sky & Telescope ran an article on July 12th saying that Meade was also on the chopping block, although at the time of this writing, their site is still online.
You have to wonder what problems you might have selling telescopes today. Many people live where there is light pollution. We’d like to think there are still people who want to ponder the universe from their backyard, though.
There are still people selling telescopes, so presumably, one of them — maybe Celestron — will take up the slack. Or maybe we’ll see a resurgence in telescope homebrewing.
After all, if you have a 3D printer, you could make a 114/900 mm telescope on a tight budget. Or, try IKEA.
Orion Telescopes & Binoculars Purchases Meade Instruments
June 1, 2021
https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/orion-telescopes-binoculars-purchases-meade/
Optronic Technologies, Inc., better known to backyard astronomers as Orion Telescopes & Binoculars, has announced the acquisition of Meade Instruments following the approval of the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California.
In 2019 Orion Telescopes & Binoculars sued Meade, then a subsidiary of Chinese manufacturer Ningbo Sunny Electronic Co. Ltd, in an antitrust lawsuit that included several other manufacturers. The lawsuit found that Sunny colluded with other Chinese manufacturers in a price-fixing scheme that formed a monopoly over the domestic consumer telescope market. In December 2019, Meade filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
The long comment by John-Haynes is most informative. Excerpts:
For MOST of the mainstream amateur astronomy equipment, there’s only a few factories in China responsible for the manufacturing…The Synta Technology Company of Taiwan and their manufacturing arm, the Suzhou Synta Optical Technology, appears to be the largest. They created the SkyWatcher brand name for their products in 1999, and in the early-to-mid 2000’s bought out both Tasco and Celestron, to whom they had been supplying equipment for several years already…I don’t know the numbers, but I’d estimate they account for at least 75%, and probably more, of the amateur telescope equipment sold in the United States and Europe…Ningbo-Sunny purchased Meade several years ago and kept it running, but, as has been established in court, they were at least colluding with Synta concerning pricing.
My comment: the end result – a Chinese monopoly for low to mid-priced telescopes and binoculars, same as currently exists for sighting optics for firearms.
Our family got an 8″ reflector just before the Grand Pando and it has been fantastic. But where we live is so light polluted. It’s Bortle 7 at best meaning we can most stars in major constellations. Polaris is pretty dim and you have to know what you’re looking for. And we don’t even live in a huge city or anything, it’s haze plus light pollution. You can get filters but with the popularity of LED lights the old style notch filters that did well
With sodium lamps don’t work well anymore.
Now we mostly set it up a couple times a year when we go camping .
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The future is expensive but I’ve been tempted to save for a next gen telescope that uses digital averaging and you”look” at the iPad. That is like having a camera with long exposure only it’s digital and in real time. But I do love sitting at the eye piece with a star chart hopping from here to there. But then again (again) it’s frustrating to do that for 10-15 min and see…nothing when you get there.
I’m not surprised telescope manufacture are going under is what I’m saying. I believe Orion still made their top end stuff in England. With the factors noted above it’s sad but not surprising.
“people who have telescopes with the company for repair are likely to never see them again”
How is that not theft?
It is, but good luck finding a legal entity (remember: here in the US, corporations are people, too! 🤣) to sue or jail.
If even a few customers with equipment in for repair would petition the bankruptcy court there is a pretty good chance they could get return of their property directed as part of the eventual settlement. They would likely be treated like other unsecured creditors and might have to pay for shipping, might get back a bag of disassembled parts.
Asking the court would not be free but needn’t be prohibitively expensive.
kind of a bummer. i have a couple orion telescopes. they were very inexpensive, especially for what i got. i’m pretty sure they were made in China or Taiwan. so practically, what does this mean? i think it means i’ll be buying from the same factory but with a different brand in the middle (not that i need any more equipment than i already own! :P ). the question “do i buy the GSO or the re-branded GSO?” just got incrementally easier — you buy the GSO. so i’m not terribly concerned about it. the ease access for these sort of things has only gotten better. so maybe it’s hardly a bummer at all.
i think this is an inevitable path for a lot of companies that have found themselves as ‘just importers’. efficient markets dispose of middlemen. but i did like orion’s catalog…i felt like they had a good selection of most of the products of interest to me, at prices that were mostly reasonable to me. but after you make the decision between a 6″ F/5, 6″ F/8, and an 8″ F/6 as you enter the hobby, that hardly matters…you’re gonna be trawling astronomics and agena astro looking for good deals on special eyepieces any way. but i’ve become a “just buy a plossl at every focal length that interests you” advocate so the orion catalog truly did have my interests in mind.
i was playing my temu melodica last night and thinking about how amazing it is that China has filled the world with affordable student-grade musical instruments. it really is something. made me realize my Chinese accordion is more than 25 years old. it has a few faults but it’s still playable and “worth repairing” and that doesn’t seem so bad once you count up the years.
I don’t think there’s demand for small telescopes – if there was, they’d still be in business, simple as that. It’s not light pollution. My theory? It’s a deterioration in curiosity, among other intellectual pursuits due to overstimulation by excessive media intake.
And also telescopes simply don’t work. Do the test yourself – Buy a telescope on Amazon that’s advertised at 4,500x magnification and a picture of Saturn’s rings on the box (from Voyager) and point it upwards and you can’t even find the moon. You’ve just wasted $98, good luck making the case for a $2,000 telescope purchase.
We live in a world where vast numbers of people are deciding to not vaccinate their kids against measles.
I find it all tragic. I’m on my fourth telescope build, a simple 8″ reflector. I hope I’m not the only person who looks through it. But I’ve seen Idiocracy (Mike Judge’s groundbreaking documentary from the future) and I’m afraid.
i feel like you’ve gotten a negative perspective from the outside that caused you to not look inside.
the 4500x drug store telescope long refractor with plastic lenses is just that — only sold at drug stores. i can’t find any of them on amazon. when i have seen them in the flesh, they are much less than $100.
if you actually go on amazon and look at the $100 telescopes, it’s a bunch of real telescopes. you’ll find some frustrations with the mounts…they’re not perfect. but they are not garbage either. the cheapest lens / mirror assemblies coming from the Synta factory are pretty good these days. the orion skyscanner 100 is getting harder to find i guess but it was $120 and is absolutely everything i could hope for from an f/4 100mm reflector with the cutest little “tabletop dobsonian” mount.
in the realm of cheapest refractors, the ubiquitous f/15 60mm that was like looking through a soda straw with an effective field of view of less than a degree has given way to the f/5.7 70mm, and you can easily get views of around 3 degrees. it’s gotten a LOT easier to find the moon. even people who have spent thousands of dollars on their telescopes wind up buying one of these for their kids and saying stuff like “I was very impressed for a $100 achromat”.
there are some challenges but the quality at the bottom of the market has never been better. this particular movement that eventually killed Orion also gave us an enormous step up in the $100 telescope category.
“you’ll find some frustrations with the mounts…”
Well… we are living in the days of home 3d printing. Just sayin… seems like a solvable problem and an opportunity for some good oshw projects.
No, not really. For cameras with lenses yes, but not for any real telescope.
There are 3D printable Astrophotography trackers but they are for just that, cameras and lenses. Even an 80mm refractor would wobble for ages on those mounts.
Ive been doing AP and Visual for quite a few years and had many different mounts.
Trust me, a telescope is not fun to use when you have to wait 20 seconds for the wobble to stop after each slew to a different target. And youre not getting a solid EQ mount + a good refractor for $100-200. Whats sold on amazon is 99% toys and cheap plastic but there are some exceptions.
Good, solid manual EQ Mounts start at $600. Ofc you can always just buy a dobsonian to get the sturdiest possible mount and the largest aperture your wallet can handle for an unbeatable price per inch of aperture ratio. But youre not gonna do AP with that.
Im a lazy person, if i was to venture into telescopes again, id buy something eq-6 based with a maksutov. I have too little time and even less interest in macgyvering with a telescope. Fiddling with a crap mount is the most off putting thing in astronomy.
I do think it’s light pollution. I’ve tried viewing meteor showers in my area and it’s impossible. I have to drive 30min for a crappy view, or 1hr away for a good view. The light pollution “green” zone gets further away every year. So I haven’t even attempted to buy my way out of this hole, I’m not driving 2hr at night. Over 80% of the US lives in a metropolitan area. There’s no demand because nobody can even see the night sky.
Well, as a potential buyer for many years, I have a comment. I have always wanted a bigger telescope and looked at all of the brands mentioned. But, every time I would start putting money away the price would move way higher. For something like 30 years I kept revisiting the idea of getting a bigger scope. I still only have toy scopes. I have happily traveled to dark sky sites with my toys and been rather happy. But I gave up during the “Great Gouging”.
So as an avid amateur I am at least a little satisfied those brands collapsed. That being said, I will never buy of those sky high “hand made” scopes. You guys can forget it. I can afford any one of them but I am not so stupid as to tell myself that I am buying the best, just look at the price tag.
I’ll keep using my toy scopes and binoculars.
I wonder if anyone’s making mods for my Meade DS114? There was a LOT of wiggle in the gears of that drive system, enough the focus motor was pretty much mandatory.
Go out at night and look up. What do you see? If you lived where I do it would be maybe one or two bright stars. And, that’s the situation for much of the population. It doesn’t inspire you to spend a bundle on a telescope.
I can still see the Milky Way, but I also have crap internet… it’s a trade-off.
Shout out for Hadley, the diy 3D printed 114/900mm reflector telescope that you can build for around US$150.
For anyone wanting to build a scope, Robert over at Analog Sky has some fantastic designs for binocular scopes that leverage regular eyepieces and filters.
You can also get kits if you don’t have access to or want to 3D print yourself.
Full disclosure, I have purchased all his available kits and am very happy with what they can do. I also own an 8″ SCT for comparison and am a member of our local astronomy group.
I suspect that the future lies in telescopes with image sensors and software enhancement anyway, as opposed to purely optical telescopes like offered by Orion, Meade, and Celestron. I just did some casual online searching and found telescopes with digital sensors that greatly enhance sensitivity by capturing photons over time and include various processing techniques to sharpen the image and filter noise and light pollution. One model I looked at will even tell you what you’re looking at by comparing the image with its own database. Almost all of them include automatic az/el positioning and tracking.
And except for the Seestar S50, they are all utterly overpriced.
For people that have never visually observed through a telescope before, these scopes are good. For everyone else its just disappointment.
The images they can deliver are quite limited due to the Mount and the results are often less than desirable without serious manual post processing.
Visual will always be a lot more fun.
I clearly said “the future”. The relatively low resolution and high prices won’t last forever. I can’t think of a single technical reason why they would. Can you??
Increasing the resolution puts even more demands on the guidance system and mount, which means prices will drop slowly if at all. All the sub 1500k€ remote controlled scopes I seen reviewed have been utter sheit on planetary work, which, ironically, is the only thing you can use a telescope for in heavier light pollution.
fwiw orion also offered products aimed at digital photography. they covered the whole range of the hobby pretty well imo.
it’s amazing what people can do with stacked exposures and post processing even from the middle of light polluted cities! in terms of ‘getting work done’, i’m sure you’re right. but it really scratches a different itch than eyeball observing does.
The building that once housed Orion in Watsonville CA was listed for sale in mid August, 2024. Pictures on the real estate web site shows telescopes still on display in the show room.
Although the Meade site may be up, the links to instruction manuals are disabled. Astro club I’m a member of just inherited an RCX20 with MaxMount….thank goodness we downloaded the manual before Orion disabled the Meade links.
I used to work at Orion in Capitola and then Watsonville CA. It was a great company to work for, many fond memories.
I wish Tim and Deborah and Steve (if he’s still there) all the best. You did a great thing for all of us by providing great tools for which to see our world and our universe.
Aimee Holcomb
Meh. Who needs a telescope (or a lot of other things) when we have the interwebs?