on 00/10/07 8:29 PM, Frank Bittinger at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> .... The Orion catalog is a good guide to
> unbiased neutual sources of information...
That IS a joke, right? I missed the :-)
Orion is in the business of selling things. They do a decent job of that.
They're not the cheapest, they don't have the best quality, they don't
provide the best service. But they're not really bad in those areas either.
But they're NOT in the business of educating the public. Sometimes I think
they're trying to offer some useful information to the catalog customer.
Their diagrams about how the various eyepieces and scope designs work, for
example, are nice and informative. But then there are the gorgeous color
nebula pix. Page 5 of the most recent catalog for example, is selling the
new XT4.5 Dob (a nice scope, BTW) but the caption reads "see these celestial
gems with the XT4.5" and shows a picture of m42 with much more color than
what you would see with a 20" scope. This same egregious error is repeated
throughout the catalog. And I am very sure that it is not an accident; the
Orion folks know that those images are obtained only with photographic
techniques. Worse, they know that many inexperienced buyers will see the
pix and assume (logically enough) that they represent what is visible in the
eyepiece with the instrument in question. This is not only dishonest, false
advertising but it is also a cruel trick to play on the budding new
astronomer. I'm not a lawyer (and I don't play one on TV) and there's
probably some tricky way that what they're doing is not actually illegal.
But they should be ashamed of themselves nevertheless.
(BTW, their WWW site www.telescope.com does not make this error and contains
a lot more helpful information. And, to get at least a little bit back on
topic, it offers Starry Night, which I couldn't find in the latest catalog.)
--
Bill Arnett [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Emerald Hills, CA USA http://nineplanets.org/
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