Orion Telescopes
Orion Telescopes & Binoculars is an American retail company that sells telescopes, binoculars and accessories online and in-store for astronomy and birdwatching. It was founded in 1975 and has corporate offices in Watsonville, California. A large proportion of its products are manufactured by the Chinese company Synta for the Orion brand name. Orion Telescopes & Binoculars ships its products to the United States and over 20 other countries. Orion puts out a semi-quarterly mail-order catalog as well as email catalogs. The company is a prominent advertiser in North American astronomy magazines, such as ''Sky & Telescope'' and ''Astronomy''. History In 1975, Orion Telescopes & Binoculars was founded in a garage in Santa Cruz, California by Tim Gieseler, who served as its only president and CEO. Between the mid-1990s and 2005, Orion only sold binoculars, telescopes, and accessories under the "Orion" brand. In January 2005, Orion was acquired by Imaginova, the U.S. conglomerate foun ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Watsonville, California
Watsonville is a city in Santa Cruz County, California, located in the Monterey Bay Area of the Central Coast (California), Central Coast of California. The population was 52,590 according to the 2020 United States Census, 2020 census. Predominantly Latino and Democratic Party (United States), Democratic, Watsonville is a self-designated sanctuary city."Watsonville-Santa Cruz JACL Holds Candlelight Vigil in Observance of Feb. 19," ''Pacific Citizen'', March 10–23, 2017, p. 9. History Watsonville's land was first inhabited by an Ohlone nation of Indigenous Californians. This tribe settled along the Pajaro Dunes since the land was fertile and useful for the cultivation of their plants and animals. Spanish era In 1769, the Portolá expedition - first European explorers of the area - came to the area from the south, where soldiers described a big bird they saw near a large river. The story survived in the river's name, ''Rio del Pajaro'' (River of the Bird). The Portolá exped ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Celestron
Celestron is an American company based in Torrance, California, United States, that manufactures telescopes and distributes telescopes, binoculars, spotting scopes, microscopes, and accessories manufactured by its parent company, the Synta Technology Corporation of Taiwan. History The predecessor of Celestron was Valor Electronics, an electronics and military components firm founded in 1955 by Tom Johnson. Johnson became involved with telescopes when he built a 6" reflecting telescope for his two sons. In 1960, Johnson established the "Astro-Optical" division of Valor, which would later become Celestron. By 1964, Johnson had founded "Celestron Pacific" as a division of Valor Electronics offering Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes from 4" to 22". In 1970 Celestron introduced its "C8" 8" diameter 2032 mm focal length, ƒ10 telescope, the first of a new line of telescopes built using methods developed by Celestron to produce Schmidt-Cassegrains at a high volume and low cost. These m ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Fluorite
Fluorite (also called fluorspar) is the mineral form of calcium fluoride, CaF2. It belongs to the halide minerals. It crystallizes in isometric cubic habit, although octahedral and more complex isometric forms are not uncommon. The Mohs scale of mineral hardness, based on scratch hardness comparison, defines value 4 as fluorite. Pure fluorite is colourless and transparent, both in visible and ultraviolet light, but impurities usually make it a colorful mineral and the stone has ornamental and lapidary uses. Industrially, fluorite is used as a flux for smelting, and in the production of certain glasses and enamels. The purest grades of fluorite are a source of fluoride for hydrofluoric acid manufacture, which is the intermediate source of most fluorine-containing fine chemicals. Optically clear transparent fluorite lenses have low dispersion, so lenses made from it exhibit less chromatic aberration, making them valuable in microscopes and telescopes. Fluorite optics are also ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Dispersion (optics)
In optics, and by analogy other branches of physics dealing with wave propagation, dispersion is the phenomenon in which the phase velocity of a wave depends on its frequency; sometimes the term chromatic dispersion is used for specificity to optics in particular. A medium having this common property may be termed a dispersive medium (plural ''dispersive media''). Although the term is used in the field of optics to describe light and other electromagnetic waves, dispersion in the same sense can apply to any sort of wave motion such as acoustic dispersion in the case of sound and seismic waves, and in gravity waves (ocean waves). Within optics, dispersion is a property of telecommunication signals along transmission lines (such as microwaves in coaxial cable) or the pulses of light in optical fiber. Physically, dispersion translates in a loss of kinetic energy through absorption. In optics, one important and familiar consequence of dispersion is the change in the angle of refra ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Apochromatic
An apochromat, or apochromatic lens (apo), is a photographic or other lens that has better correction of chromatic and spherical aberration than the much more common achromat lenses. Explanation Chromatic aberration is the phenomenon of different colors focusing at different distances from a lens. In photography, chromatic aberration produces soft overall images, and color fringing at high-contrast edges, like an edge between black and white. Astronomers face similar problems, particularly with telescopes that use lenses rather than mirrors. ''Achromatic'' lenses are corrected to bring ''two'' wavelengths into focus in the same plane – typically red (~0.590 µm) and blue (~0.495 µm). ''Apo''chromatic lenses are designed to bring ''three'' colors into focus in the same plane – typically red (~0.620 µm), green (~0.530 µm), and blue (~0.465 µm). The residual color error (secondary spectrum) can be up to an order of magnitude less than for an achro ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Equatorial Mount
An equatorial mount is a mount for instruments that compensates for Earth's rotation by having one rotational axis, the polar axis, parallel to the Earth's axis of rotation. This type of mount is used for astronomical telescopes and cameras. The advantage of an equatorial mount lies in its ability to allow the instrument attached to it to stay fixed on any celestial object with diurnal motion by driving one axis at a constant speed. Such an arrangement is called a sidereal or clock drive. Equatorial mounts achieve this by aligning their rotational axis with the Earth, a process known as polar alignment. Astronomical telescope mounts In astronomical telescope mounts, the equatorial axis (the '' right ascension'') is paired with a second perpendicular axis of motion (known as the '' declination''). The equatorial axis of the mount is often equipped with a motorized "''clock drive''", that rotates that axis one revolution every 23 hours and 56 minutes in exact sync with the appar ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Synta Technology Corporation Of Taiwan
Synta Technology Corporation of Taiwan (Synta Taiwan), also known as Synta, is a manufacturer of telescopes and optical components headquartered in Taoyuan, Taiwan. Overview Synta Technology Corporation was founded in Taoyuan, Taiwan around 1980 by mechanical and optical designer Dazhong Shen, (a/k/a David Shen). In 1992 Synta, along with Canadian investors, established the Suzhou Synta Optical Technology Co., Ltd in Suzhou (Jiangsu), China (outside Shanghai) as a manufacturing facility producing telescopes for Celestron and Tasco. In 1999 Synta established the brand Sky-Watcher, with head offices in Richmond, British Columbia, to distribute products in Canada and Europe, and in the late 2000s, to the USA market. In 2005 Synta purchased the struggling US based Celestron, continuing its manufacture of Celestron products and running the US facilities through SW Technology Corporation, Synta's Delaware-based holding company. Synta also distributes under the Acuter name and manufactu ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Dobsonian Telescope
A Dobsonian telescope is an altazimuth-mounted Newtonian telescope design popularized by John Dobson in 1965 and credited with vastly increasing the size of telescopes available to amateur astronomers. Dobson's telescopes featured a simplified mechanical design that was easy to manufacture from readily available components to create a large, portable, low-cost telescope. The design is optimized for observing faint, deep-sky objects such as nebulae and galaxies. This type of observation requires a large objective diameter (i.e. light-gathering power) of relatively short focal length and portability for travel to less light-polluted locations. Dobsonians are intended to be what is commonly called a "light bucket" operating at low magnification, and therefore the design omits features found in other amateur telescopes such as equatorial tracking. Dobsonians are popular in the amateur telescope making community, where the design was pioneered and continues to evolve. A number o ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Refractor
A refracting telescope (also called a refractor) is a type of optical telescope that uses a lens (optics), lens as its objective (optics), objective to form an image (also referred to a dioptrics, dioptric telescope). The refracting telescope design was originally used in spyglasses and astronomy, astronomical telescopes but is also used for long-focus lens, long-focus camera lenses. Although large refracting telescopes were very popular in the second half of the 19th century, for most research purposes, the refracting telescope has been superseded by the reflecting telescope, which allows larger apertures. A refractor's magnification is calculated by dividing the focal length of the objective lens by that of the eyepiece. Refracting telescopes typically have a lens at the front, then a optical train, long tube, then an eyepiece or instrumentation at the rear, where the telescope view comes to focus. Originally, telescopes had an objective of one element, but a century later, tw ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Maksutov Telescope
The Maksutov (also called a "Mak") is a catadioptric telescope design that combines a spherical mirror with a weakly negative meniscus lens in a design that takes advantage of all the surfaces being nearly "spherically symmetrical". The negative lens is usually full diameter and placed at the entrance pupil of the telescope (commonly called a "corrector plate" or "meniscus corrector shell"). The design corrects the problems of off-axis aberrations such as coma found in reflecting telescopes while also correcting chromatic aberration. It was patented in 1941 by Russian optician Dmitri Dmitrievich Maksutov. Maksutov based his design on the idea behind the Schmidt camera of using the spherical errors of a negative lens to correct the opposite errors in a spherical primary mirror. The design is most commonly seen in a Cassegrain variation, with an integrated secondary, that can use all-spherical elements, thereby simplifying fabrication. Maksutov telescopes have been sold on the ama ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Newtonian Telescope
The Newtonian telescope, also called the Newtonian reflector or just a Newtonian, is a type of reflecting telescope invented by the English scientist Sir Isaac Newton, using a concave primary mirror and a flat diagonal secondary mirror. Newton's first reflecting telescope was completed in 1668 and is the earliest known functional reflecting telescope. The Newtonian telescope's simple design has made it very popular with amateur telescope makers. Description [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |