Yeh I know there was some kind of payment to Orion and then the bankruptcy , I just couldn’t recall the exact amount. Thanks for the legal exegesis! It’s good to hear someone else was reading those filings too. It’s crazy to read huh? Seeing the emails are wild. And you’re right the IP can still be transferred but it’s losing value and relevancy with every day that passes.

@@DylanODonnell Eh, not so much. There's still value in SCTs, in H-alpha scopes that hasn't gone away yet. A lot of telescope tech doesn't really change that quickly. But yeah, it sure was a kick reading all of those legal filings about companies that are so near and dear to us.

Thanks, you just saved me 9 minutes of video and it looks like your explanation was better. Hat's off to you for writing all that up!

"...I could never figure out why Meade ever even contested the case and brought it all the way to trial in the first place when the evidence was so very clearly against them." Just a guess... a lawyer, who saw a chance to bill some hours, told them they had a case.

@@robcat2075 Nailed it!!🔨... Most likely

I got a Tasco 520X refractor in the mid 80s, for Christmas, from Santa, (and I believe he and Mom shopped for it at Sears). That instrument was my most used telescope and discovery ever . . . despite eventually graduating to other refractors, reflectors, and the biggest being a 10" Orion Intelliscope Dobsonian

I bought the DS-10 10" Newtonian with the astrophoto upgrade in 1984. Yes, the electronics were very basic and the drive corrector overheated the RA motor one night causing a gear in the motor housing to strip. I redone the electronics to a proper and more stable operation as my career was in electronics. Just about everything from the original except the optical train was replaced over the decades. I still use it to this day for astrophotography.

welcome to capitalism.....

All of the telescope companies are _tiny,_ certainly not "massive conglomerates." It's a very niche market.

@@bradmuise1327 No, that's free market.

I have a 1991 meade 10" lx premiere, basically an LX6 with an f10 ota. It isn't bad for what it is, but I would much rather have my usa C11 on celestron/losmandy G11. All of my gear was stolen by tweakers most likely living in the storage facility, so they could move it from unit to unit and never get caught on camera, and then truck it out later. I lost way more than just telescope gear Since tweakers are dumb, and don't know what half the stuff is, they didn't take the tripod or counterweights for the g11, since it does not look like a tripod when dissasembled. Yes they took all of my other tripods. The 10" scope, with the original trunk case, dec motor, original 2" diagonal and black plastic meade eyepiece case with 5 japanese super plossls, was a straight trade for the losmandy leftovers and some piggyback rings. Not terribly long after, another friend sold me a powerstar C8 loaded with case, original japanese prism diagonal and 26mm silvertop, full handbox option with focus and dec motors (but missing the mounting hardware for the dec). The price was so low I won't mention. I had a nice usa pre lawsuit meade 8" lx200R ota, on a gm8 initially but I did sell that because I had a manual cg5 with ra drive. I also had tv101, pronto, solarmax 60, stellarvue m3, big binos/manfrotto etc and an extensive eyepiece collection and some sbig, optec and astrodon ccd equipment. Tweakers suck. Talk about a hobby killer. And my 2 scts were cherries. After getting a bunch of lesser stuff used at the beginning of the covid lockdowns before the shortages kicked in and prices going up, I had another run of bad luck losing several scopes, some mounts, and music gear, amps and guitars (storage had probably 30-50x value of music and audio gear as well, these twaznackers scored), effectively stolen by a city in the county I used to live in, via impoundment of my van loaded with gear that they were aware of, and overly long detainment for some bogus stuff that should have been handled differently. I am sure they had a bidder lined up when my van went to auction. It was only an Xt8, 127mak, beat up omni102, really rough early cg5, nexstar GT mount, an old vixen 60mm f15AZ and an assortment of plossls and flat fields and probably some other stuff I am forgetting, but many essentials like all but my 4# counterweights, power tank, and well, the van to haul it all. So I have been grounded for the last 3 years, and I am surprised I am still alive. Fear of the unknown can do that to a person. And I lost my lightbridge 114 that I was going to use on the gt, when the person I lent it too refused to return it... humans Now I have the itch again, but I have to figure something out. I have been mostly using my etx90 and st80 tubes on my one remaining camera tripod, and I set up the c8 once in the small zenith only "courtyard" of the 5 unit building I am in, but that cost me some damage to my 22mm vixen. LVW that got knocked off the flat base of the wedge in front of the drive base where I put eyepieces since that tripod doesn't have an accessory tray. Doh! Barrel dented, no more filters for that guy, and it now rattles. But optically it survived so it could be worse. Why do I make comments like this? Aspergers

​@@bradmuise1327without it we wouldn't be here lets be real we wouldn't have much lol

It was haha

It was the black/white contrast of the screen to his left. Autofocus works! Bought a 10" LX200 in late 1993, and had two chips with data for 747 objects. The thing just worked, night after night, year after year, and there were years that it lived outside under a tarp ( '01-'07) in Idaho and Colorado. Long live Meade!

I figured it was a normal nervous habit of continuously refocusing, like at the telescope eyepiece.

Meade didn’t diversify beyond alt-az SCT fast enough. We are blessed with choice now. My only worry is Coronado, but then we have Lunt.

It was trying to sneak peak us his PixInsight workflow. 😆

Agree.. the innovation has to be in the mount and the software.

Yep. I have a 6" Cave Astrola (vintage!), a 10" Meade Newtonian, and a 7" Meade Maksutov, and a Losmandy GM mount. I don't need any more, and most of my stuff is 20+ years old. Cameras are the only things that change enough to upgrade.

Agree. I still have/use my original Celestron C-8 bought in 1978. Did buy a small Skywatcher to replace using a telephoto for astro photo's, but most ly one and done.

Yeah, they have changed the type of glass and made the outer tube with lighter materials, so that is an incentive for some people to upgrade or change, but yeah, if you look after your gear and keep the unused OTA and viewfinders in a protected case, the same OTA is good for so many years it is crazy. My fridge makes a funny noise sometimes, but that's fridge personality, not a technical problem, they are all different :)

The basic design of any telescope, be it a refractor, reflector or cat, hasn't changed since their invention. If anything, they have become more refined, especially refractors which now have ED and apochromatic designs. I have a vintage Helios 102mm achromatic refractor and it still gives great views and pinsharp stars. I guess that telescope manufacturers need to innovate in other areas, as well as to provide aftermarket support, such as parts replacement and software updates.

Yep!

They never had much to begin with (Cupertino) and then one day, just gone. Signage, everything. There was a store in Santa Cruz that closed up before hand.

I've got a few Astro-Physics telescopes and a mount that were designed and built in the US. A different market segment that what Meade and Celestron mostly sold into.

great journey!

Absolutely .. accurate assessment.

Me too! Meade were like Ferrari for a while there.

I think I still have one of those meade fancy catalogs from back in the day as well. 😁

I used to be much the same. I started with a British small-scale manufacturer 11" Newtonian, which was outstanding. I then sold this and fancied the Meade SCTs due to their ease of connection to computers. It was a good 'scope for imaging, but visually, compared to the Newt, it was really very poor indeed. House moves forced something more robust to be thrown in the back of a car - a Skywatcher 6" refractor. Now 22 years old, much cheaper and more practical than the heavy short tube SCT. I'd never buy an SCT again.

I have a 30 year old eyepiece case from Orion that is still going strong. I recently bought the short tube 80 mm refractor to carry with me to see the eclipse in April. Got to show lots of people the eclipse using it and even a tripod I got from them. They were a great company.

Same here. I would rush out to get the latest Sky and Telescope issue and drool over the Meade, Celestron, Obsession telescopes. The articles on DIY amateur astronomy was the main draw card. I ended up buying an Odyssey 8 inch Dobsonian with a Telrad viewfinder. Wonderful memories looking at deep sky objects.

Yeh that model doesn’t work very well.

100% this. In the UK I only know of Orion for having Syna & GSO rebranded scopes and mounts.

Interesting

The loaner scope coordinator in our club noticed a couple of years ago that Orion started dropping items he needed for maintenance. Red dot finders, certain eyepieces, replacement dovetails, planispheres and star charts, red flashlights, etc. Also, the club usually gives a 8" or 6" Dob as a raffle prize at one of our major events. We couldn't even get an Orion Dob this year. Now it is making some sense.

Interesting data point. I have owned 2 meade scopes and two orions. So indeed small data set but both meade scopes I had I sold because the primary mirrors were so bad. The orions had amazing figure for being commercial scopes. I still have an orion xx14g goto dob as my outreach scope that has given many of my fellow club members the best views of (blank).

Those Meade ads in Astronomy magazine, those were the days… !

yeh that's a horror story! Glad Celestron was a better experience.

I agree that Meade doesn’t support their products once they’re out of production and Celestron always has

❤️

I like the industry news reports huh? .. it's hard to know what's going on in astronomy otherwise. it's not like it shows up on CNN.

Yeh the "Anti trust" lawsuit win hasn't really borne any fruit has it?

16542 Millikan Avenue in Irvine, then 6001 Oak Canyon, located as well in Irvine. The Oak Canyon in use until 2009

actually made by American workers?

@@kenfrank2730 Originally yes and for many years.

So you have the LX200 OTA?

I was surprised nobody else had done a video either. Seems like big news?

Ken's videos introduced me to the basics of astronomy so many years ago... (I was 8 years old 😂)

Yeh.. that's exactly right. It's important to note it's a big industry, but it's not huge as far as industries go. There isn't a lot of room for too many players, but there is still lots of ambition behind the scenes.

OPT was purchased by Agena Astro. I have purchased many things from Agena over the years. Scott (who I dealt with directly), and all of Agena customer service is top notch. Like many others, I used to drool over the Orion catalogs. But I bought the "same stuff" by another "brand" elsewhere. The Atlas mounts were Skywatcher mounts, with different paint and decals. I still use a Skywatcher HEQ5 non-GoTo to which I added an ST4 port to the handbox. Although a few times I did buy some Orion branded smaller items when they were "on sale" and/or "clearance" items. My very first scope as a child in the 60s, was an Edmund Space Conqueror 3" reflector. I had so much fun with that. I bought a Meade 8" F/6 mirror and built a Newtonian reflector. It was great! Then my first "real" scope was a Meade 8" SCT on the LX3 base I bought used. Then later sold it and bought a brand new Meade 8" LX5 SCT. I loved that scope and learned quickly how to collimate an SCT. I have bought many scopes through the years with some Meade, some Celestron, and some others. In later years, I have been repairing the LX200 Classic electronics for others. Which also includes the LXD600/650/700/750 GEM mounts. My own LXD600 I bought without electronics I had converted it to use the Autostar controller instead of the old LX200 Classic electronics. It is a well built GEM head miles ahead of other "sleeve bearing" and "ball bearing" mounts. It has heavy duty tapered roller bearings. I also went "big" and bought a brand new DS-16A (A version has real bearings in the RA axis) and Meade never did charge me the FOB shipping from Irvine. I no longer have that scope (used the mirror in a Dob), but I still have the mount I customized adding a worm drive to the DEC shaft. I also converted an LX50 into an LX200 Classic (had to machine the base for the LX200 Classic RA motor). Now I have converted that one to use the Autostar #495/497/Audiostar with a modified ETX125 mainboard. The Meade fork mounts back then were very robust, better than Celestron's offerings at the time. The LX200 GPS (and newer) began the downhill trend in quality using more plastic, and "hot glue" during assembly, WTF?. The LX90? Faggetaboutit. The drives were sloppy, and used the thinner forks of the very early LX fork mounts covered in plastic. Although I "fixed" the drive sloppiness, the 10" was still too heavy for the thin forks so I sold it cheap to someone at a Star Party. I think the biggest turning point (besides the quality dropping off), was the RCX versions that were way too complicated with many failures. Meade brought one to a Star Party, and the accompanying engineers couldn't even get it to work right. That and the lawsuit where Meade called them "Ritchey-Chrétien" which they were not, and lost. They were then renamed "RCX". That deceptive move lost Meade a lot of customers. I still have one of the MCSOG 8" which had the silver coated mirrors, which also failed miserably. Silver never lasts very long, even when hard overcoated. That one is getting a fresh aluminum coating for the mirrors. It does have very sharp optics so it is well worth the cost to send the mirrors out. When Meade bought Coronado, the quality also suffered quite a bit since the days of David/Andy Lunt. With their (Meade) blocking filters now failing, the SMII and SMIII Ha scopes will be all but useless very soon. Although a Lunt blocking filter will "work", the wavelengths are a bit different. The gold coatings on the Coronado diagonal mirrors are also failing so changing the ITF will not cure a bad Coronado blocking filter that has a degraded mirror. Their "Rich Field Tuning" (vs original tilt tuning) was also a bust sometimes breaking the glass, and inability to fully tune on band at altitude, and some temperature ranges. Meade ruined the Coronado name. I'm retired now, but still take on the occasional LX200 Classic repair jobs. But major spare parts, mainboards and motor gearboxes specifically, are getting scarce. Meade quit making them decades ago. I have a few, but only a few spares left. Clearline-tech.com makes replacement handboxes, motor encoder boards, and replacement power panels for the LX200 Classic so those are easy to get if needed.

Being made in Mexico isn't necessarily bad. Many of the Mexican-made Fender guitars have been superior to their US-made counterparts, for example. But the quality control needs to be there.

Thanks Zigs!

Really interesting.. sounds like it could've been a structural / management issue despite any of the lawsuit stuff. Thanks for the insights.

@@DylanODonnell I definitely think that internal team issues was part of it at least. You can't expect to make sales and shipments if you don't have the sales team needed to do that.

I remember that scope, it was a beast and with that monstrous base/mount. And didn’t it also introduce that Starlock tracking telescope/electronics on that scope as well…?

Hey! We have the same scopes 😊 I got mine during covid when it was the best deal I could find. No complaints here and I agree about never selling it. So many happy memories with it already and lots more to come. Cheers!

Totally agree. It’s not just about hardware.

@@DylanODonnell Agreed. It's especially not just about hardware today, it's about the electronics and the software. Celestron's Starsense Explorer smartphone finder app is a fantastic idea, making it easier for beginning visual observing. And it just works, reliably! Everyone I know has SkySafari or an app based on SkySafari (often Celestron-labeled) on their phone. Then you move into the new smart scopes and astrophotography and the optical train, although critically necessary, seems to be secondary to the whole process. Compare to all that, the venerable LX200 with Autostar handset feels ancient, and the one Lightswitch I've worked with that is supposed to auto-align to the sky never worked reliably. Meade has/had great optics, but clunky electronics IMO.

yup, kinda sad eh

I bought the 826 in 1980! Great scope. But HEAVY for a 14-year-old.

@@jongroubert4203 Damn heavy!

What's interesting is that my Orion mount is actually a rebranded SkyWatcher. I can use the Synscan app with it just as easily as with my AZ-GTI. So parts might still be obtainable. And the ability to use these mounts manually is still a nice touch.

Yeh I think the lawsuit may have disrupted the supply chain for Orion :/

@@DylanODonnell More likely it was "Collusion II" - Celestron trying - and now succeeding - to get rid of Orion again.

Wow man

Yeh and now it’s had two different owners since while it’s been withering on the vine. :/

UPDATE: Looks like the website is finally down. I hope not too many customers got burned.

Unitron scopes now fetch insane prices on Ebay now.