Orion CT80 Compact Refractor: The Achilles’ heel of rich-field achromatic refractors is chromatic aberration, but when you goal is scooping up ultra-wide, low-magnification views of the Milky Way, who cares about chroma. Witness Orion’s versatile new f/5 CT80 80-mm Compact Refractor ($109.00US) which is designed to excel at wide-field observations […]
Fifth Star Labs’ Sky Guide app enjoys a near perfect score of 4.9 from the almost 70,000 users who have taken the time to rate it … which is, well, astonishing. There is ample reason for its popularity, though, given the WOW! factor of its thousands of breathtaking celestial images, […]
With greatly improved optics over its predecessor, the Orion Pro Lanthanum Zoom eyepiece ($199.99US) now features high-end lanthanum glass lens elements, which greatly minimize chromatic aberration. The result is clean, crisp images free of color fringing. Ideal for both astronomical and terrestrial visual applications, this new zoom eyepiece can go […]
The Cosmic Watch app for iOS and Android marries the functions of a world clock and an astronomical clock into a beautifully-rendered, uniquely-instructive interface. Celestial Dynamics, the apps developer, refined the functionality of the app in Version 2.0 and has produced a short video that highlights the recent improvements. The […]
Orion RedBeam LED Headlamp with“Motion Sensing,” means, no more fumbling in the dark for a tiny switch. You wear a headlamp to keep both hands free, but how free is your dominant hand when its priority is turning your headlamp on when needed and off when not. In addition to […]
Orion Magnetic Dobsonian Counterweight: If you’ve got a Dob, you’ve likely done it – resorted to zip bags of lead fishing sinkers or ankle weights duct-taped to your OTA. Well, you can stop with the ugly tape residue. There’s now a practical, versatile counterweight solution for fine balance of your […]
Rigel Systems recently introduced the PulsGuide Jr ($39.95US), a shorter (by 1/2 inch) version of its popular PulsGuide guiding telescope eyepiece illuminator for finders. Both illuminators are designed to attach onto the illuminator port of an eyepiece equipped with crosshair or micrometer reticle. These eyepieces are used for guiding during […]
The Orion Pentaprism 90-Degree Diagonal ($199.99US) is a non-inverting, non-reversing 1.25-inch diagonal. Unlike typical star diagonals, the Orion Pentaprism Diagonal does not produce a mirror-reversed image, which can make navigation and referring to star maps difficult while observing with your telescope. But unlike common correct-image diagonals, there is no image […]
The Orion Linear BinoViewer ($499.99US) is so named because it employs a sliding linear housing for adjusting the interpupillary distance (IPD) instead of the traditional folding body. That matters, because the folding types are more prone to collimation problems, whereby the two barrels of the binoviewer become misaligned, causing double […]
The SkEye Planetarium App is an advanced Planetarium app that can also be used as a PUSHTO guide for telescopes. We’ve been enjoying the free SkEye Android planetarium app for years but only recently discovered that it is also available in a much-upgraded “pro” version. Indeed, SkEye Planetarium App basic […]
Orion GiantView ED Binoculars: Serious amateur astronomers looking for the best and brightest wide-field binocular images of the night sky will appreciate Orion Telescopes & Binoculars’ ED GiantView binos. These Orion iantView ED Binoculars combine a large 80-mm aperture with extra-low dispersion (ED) glass lenses for bright, exceptionally clear, true-color […]
Odds are there is a smartphone within reach as your read this, and much of what defines it as “smart” has to do with its sophisticated integration of camera sensors. We use those cameras to capture, well, everything, but because our smartphone-camera focus is overwhelmingly on scenes our eyes can […]