If you’re ready to swap out your standard Plossl eyepieces for oculars that will take your observing game to the next level, you should check out the Orion Telescopes & Binoculars EF Widefield 1.25″ Eyepieces. The “EF” stands for Extra Flat, which means that Orion’s EF Widefield Eyepieces are designed […]
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 Telescopes & Binoculars’ versatile new f/5 CT80 80-mm Compact Refractor ($109.00US) designed to excel at wide-field observations – day or […]
Fifth Star Labs’ Sky Guide iOS 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 […]
With greatly improved optics over its predecessor, the Orion 8- to 24-mm 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 […]
The Cosmic Watch iOS and Android apps marry 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 big […]
The headline says it all: “Motion Sensing.” Which means, no more fumbling 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 its […]
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 Dobsonian. Steel-tube Dobs are […]
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, it 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 degradation caused by […]
Orion Telescopes & Binoculars’s innovative Premium 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 […]
SkEye 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 basic has long been our favorite method […]
Serious amateur astronomers looking for the best and brightest wide-field binocular images of the night sky will appreciate Orion Telescopes & Binoculars’ introduction of its new ED GiantView binos. These Orion binoculars combine a large 80-mm aperture with extra-low dispersion (ED) glass lenses for bright, exceptionally clear, true-color views of […]