Orion Telescopes

Start Seeing the Stars like Never Before with Orion Telescopes

Telescopes are a great tool for expanding your scientific understanding of the universe. Orion telescopes are an industry standard in quality, and there is a wide variety for beginner to expert stargazers. With the following information, you'll be able to confidently navigate eBay to find exactly what you need from the Orion telescopes catalog of products.

The new and used Orion telescopes on eBay come in different styles. A reflecting telescope uses several mirrors to project an image down into the viewing field. Chromatic aberration often occurs. This essentially means that a rainbow optical illusion presents itself around your target. Designed to combat this, refracting telescopes use a series of increasingly powerful lenses to focus a distant image on one point.

Dobsonian telescopes were designed in the 1950s as a portable, inexpensive telescope. This allows Orion telescopes to reach a broader, amateur astronomy market with a low cost of entry. Some things that make Dobsonian telescopes appealing for new stargazers are:

• Construction - The tubes that Dobsonian telescopes utilize are made of much more common, durable material, making them cheaper and more sturdy.
• Mirrors - The mirrors used are much thinner than normal reflector telescopes, making the apparatus cheaper and easier to support and build.
• Simple mounting - Because they are mounted into a much simpler base, Dobsonian telescopes are built to be portable and more cost-effective.

It's highly dependent on what you want to use the telescope for, but there are a handful of variations that may or may not matter to you. They include:

• Altazimuth vs equatorial mounting - Azimuth refers to the vertical range of motion, which is simpler and cheaper. Equatorial mounts are often far more expensive (they offer horizontal as well as vertical range of motion), but allow for smoother observations.
• Magnification - Anywhere from 40-150x magnification is standard in entry-level telescopes, and more magnification means more detail.
• Tripod or table mount - Table mount telescopes tend to be azimuth, whereas tripod telescopes tend towards equatorial movement. Consequently, table mount telescopes tend to be lighter, more portable, and easier to set up.

There are five main measurements that apply to all telescopes, and it's important to know what each means in practical terms.

• Aperture - The amount of light that the telescope can take in, which affects how bright the image ends up.
• Focal length - More focal length means a clearer image, but generally translates to a larger, longer, and more unwieldy apparatus.
• Magnification - Simply put, more magnification means more detail.
• Focal ratio - A smaller visible field means greater magnification, and vice-versa; less magnification translates into a larger viewable field.
• Resolution - The ability of the device to distinguish small details, particularly in the case of two or more objects in close proximity to one another.