Telescope for sale – Orion ED80 refractor – $200 – Reduced price

Great condition. I always took good care of it.

I’ll throw in the travel bag I got for it plus the solar filter my wife got me for my birthday last year. Only used the filter once so it’s in good shape too. When you put it over the lens the sun looks like an orange rubber ball with black specks on it. Those are made by the sun’s magnetic field, which is a bunch of loops that wiggle around on its surface all tangled up together. But only look at the sun WITH the filter! Or else you’ll fry your eyeballs.

You’ll have to get your own stand for it. We moved a few months back and the one I had got busted up in the U haul. $200 out the damn window. But there a ton of options out there. They have these hi tech stands now that’ll point your telescope to anything in the sky you want. You just type in Mars or the Pinwheel galaxy or whatever you’re looking for and it’ll find it. Expensive as hell though. Never understood the appeal anyway. To me half the fun is hunting down what I want to see. A star chart, a flashlight, some coffee, and some patience will get you there. (A tip for beginners: tape some thin red paper over your flashlight to dim it so you don’t ruin your night vision.)

And then you get that thrill in your stomach when you finally find what you’re looking for. The trick is to use constellations like clues, kinda like road signs you know. Took me almost an hour one time to find the Helix nebula. Through my scope it looked like this little smear, like the sky had a fingerprint on it. It was made by a dying star. Some stars explode when they die and everything that was in them makes a nebula. That’ll happen to the Sun someday but not for billions of years, thank the lord.

Anyway, my telescope is a pretty good choice for beginners. Great for viewing the planets and deep sky stuff too. The images in the eyepiece are tight, sharp. Makes you feel like you could almost reach out and push your fingers into the craters on the moon. I hate to sell it. But I just don’t have time for it anymore with the new job and getting settled and a million other little things. Plus, there’s the light pollution around here. It’s awful. You go outside at night and the sky is greyish orange, not many stars. I have to drive out about an hour to see the good stuff and there’s just no time. Right now, the scope is in our basement collecting dust in an old produce box. I don’t think it’s been used in 3 or 4 months.

So, I hope you get way more use out of it than I do these days. I was kinda hoping to sell it to someone with a kid; but if you don’t have a kid, I won’t turn you down. Just thought it’d be nice knowing my scope is being used to show a little boy or girl how awesome space is. Me and my son used to sit in the backyard with it for hours at the old house. The moon was his favorite. Got to where he could name almost every crater. He used to have a big map of the moon and a bunch of galaxy posters up in his room everywhere. I always tell him he can take the scope out whenever. I said I would save it for him if he wants but he never said anything.

But anyway, if you buy it I want you to do me a favor. When we first moved here, I did some googling and found this little park about 50 minutes west of here called Lake Story Park. Hokey name, kinda. Anyway, I convinced my wife to take a break from the unpacking one night and we drove out there with the scope. It’s an awesome park. There’s a huge lake in the middle of it and tons of big, full trees along the water.

The night sky there is breathtaking. I mean, jam packed with stars, more than you’ve ever seen. We looked at the Pleiades, at Andromeda, at Jupiter with its moons all huddled around it. We saw Jupiter’s great red spot, which is this monster windstorm that’s twice as big as earth and blows around the planet going 400 mph. I told that to my wife that night. I always get to babbling about what we’re looking at. She always seems impressed but she’s probably just humoring me.

I’d like you to take the telescope out to Lake Story Park at least once. Look at the stars, I mean really look. It’s pretty rare to see the sky overflowing like it does there. I hope you get a little lost in it like I did. Like you’re not so on the ground anymore, you’re millions and millions of miles out there. It’s an amazing feeling. Everyone should get away from earth every once in a while.

If you’re interested my contact info is below.

 

Jenna is an email marketer by day, writer by night. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri, with her sister, three cats, and a pit mix named Athena.