ORION was founded in April, 1974, by a group of scientists at the United States Department of Energy facilities in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Our original goal was to perform correlated, instrumented observations of atmospheric and astrophysical phenomena. Since then, we have expanded in many directions including astronomy and studies of stars and constellations.

At our monthly meetings (usually the first Wednesday of the month), we sponsor lectures on interesting topics covering a wide range of technical and scientific areas.

In order to make finding our website easier on the search engines we use the orionridge page on att.net. This helps separate us from the thousands of Orion pages available on the internet.