Review of the Celestron C5 - a true classic in our hobby!

hello and welcome back to the channel today we're taking a look at one of the most iconic telescopes in our hobbies history the celestron c5 schmidt cassegrain optical tube assembly now the c5 was originally built somewhere around the early 1970s as a lower cost alternative to the c8 and when you talk about products that have been around this long i mean it's pretty hard to come up with something that's been around longer than this obviously the c8s outlive this but other telescopes you know the quest are maybe this kind of longevity is very rare in our hobby now today of course these things are made overseas they bear very little resemblance to the original c5s made in california but still there's been a continuous lineage from 1970 through today of these telescopes and in that time there have been many different variations the first ones were orange tubed on a fork mount with a driven base perhaps the most contentious of the versions of the c5 are these white tubed versions from the 1990s i've owned a couple of these and they varied widely one of them wasn't very good at all one of them was really good but only after it had been collimated when i first got that telescope it was in the worst state of collimation that i had ever seen in any telescope and in fact it was so bad i actually had trouble aligning it because when it's that far out you kind of don't know where to start but after we did get it collimated boy was it good so here's a couple of images from the moon before and after now keep in mind 10 years or so when i did this review we didn't have the quality of cameras that we do today but you can tell the difference between the quality of the images before and after collimation wow what a difference those white two versions do have sentimental value among collectors because they were among the last of the california-built celestron c5s afterwards the versions moved overseas there have been a couple of different versions of those as well including a black tube g5 version on a very inexpensive equatorial mount at the initial gray tubed nexstar and the current version which is the next rse this is characterized by what they call the triangle back on the visual back so over the years you know the prices vary quite a bit on these in the 1970s it was around 500 when introduced but in the early 1980s which were hyper inflationary which is when i got into the hobby boy did the cost of these things go up those of you in manufacturing know that when you build a smaller version of a product it doesn't necessarily cost you any less to make it your fixed costs are the same your manufacturing costs are the same your labor costs are the same it doesn't cost any less to advertise a c5 than it does a c8 but the consumer expects to pay less and in the early 1980s when inflation was very high it almost threatened the very existence of the c5 and in fact mead had a four inch midcastle grain that did not survive that era but for whatever reason the c5 did survive so let's take a look at the c5 today and see how it performs okay so here we have a c5 and you know no matter how many times i do this when i come to one of these after not having seen one for a while i'm always amazed at how tight and compact this thing is i think there's a tendency in our hobby to want to supersize everything but you know there's a place for a small well-made compact telescope which this is so we have vixen compatible dovetail plate at the bottom for mounting that's good on the top here we have provision for a finder this is standard finder spacing you can put a 6x30 optical finder on there if you want but if you can this one looks like it's been set up for a red dot finder got a couple of samples here and these will just slide on like this and you can use it like that so we've got the mirror in the back secondary we've got three collimation screws that's good up to the back here and this is the focuser so those of you who have followed me through the years know that i have a pet peeve about these cheap stamped steel visual backs they've got one set screw back here and everything that you are entrusting back after the visual back here is being held on by this tiny little set screw in i it's just trouble waiting to happen i've seen things fall out and they're cheaply made celestron is not the only one that does this mead does the same thing they have a similar piece of stamped steel in the back and even if you buy one of the larger schmidt caster grains it's you still get this cheap visual back i mean come on guys you can do better than this one of the first things i do when i get a schmidt cassegrain as i take this thing off and i usually just toss it but i will put on a two inch visual back and i've got a couple of samples here one from teleview and one from astrophysics people have their preferences here these are not expensive this is an easy upgrade to do the teleview has two big knobs here and a compression ring the astrophysics has three smaller knobs but there are three of them and also a compression ring and this just screws on like this and even if you never use two inch accessories you can put an inch and a quarter adapter in here and i don't know if this is coming across on video but you know this is way more physically secure than that little piece was that i just showed you okay so people will sometimes ask me what's the difference should i get a c5 or a c6 so we have the c5 here with its slightly larger brother and you see there is an increase in size i don't know how much this is coming across in video but you've got about a five pound optical tube here this one's about eight pounds and it may put you into a slightly larger amount so going from the five to the six you're looking at a weight increase of some 50 percent and a volume increase of some 70 percent and all of that is on behalf of one inch so is it worth it a lot of things which are just starting to come perceptible in a c5 do start to become easier to see in the c6 there's plenty of reasons to buy each one of these no correct answer just buy the one that suits your needs okay you know if you talk to any c5 owner for any period of time they're probably going to mention this the c5 was selected by nasa to go up in space shuttle missions and boy did celestron get some good marketing mileage out of that one for a while you know based on how small and light and compact this thing is there's going to be a temptation to want to put it on a photo tripod and i see a lot of beginners doing this and if you've done this before you probably figured out it doesn't work very well it doesn't matter how sturdy the thing looks keep in mind this has a 1250 millimeter focal length so it's not the size and the weight that's going to do you in it's the focal length think about it this way if you're a photographer and you had a 1250 millimeter focal length lens what kind of amount would you have to put underneath it but it's even worse for astronomy because you're going to be magnifying that image and not only does your mount have to hold the telescope steady it has to be able to pan the thing smoothly across the sky to track the stars and at 1250 millimeters you are going to be pushing the mount around quite a bit so you can try this a lot of beginners do again you figure out it doesn't work very well because again the mount has to be steady and it has to be able to smoothly track those seem to be two contradictory things so you really do need an astronomy specific mount and we've got a few of them here let's take a look so the first option you have is an alt as telescope mount like this vixen porter you've seen this thing here before i'm not sure this is available right now at the time of filming they used to cost anywhere from three to five hundred dollars if you want one of these you may be able to find one used or there are similar models available from explore scientific orion stellar view has an m2 and there may be others as well but this is pretty simple you've got a vixen compatible plate at the bottom and you put the telescope on here like this and you're good to go and again this looks like a photographic tripod but it's actually much better it's designed specifically for telescopes to track smoothly across the sky okay so your second option is to put it on an electronic mount of some kind either one that's got a passive tracking system or one with an active go-to system like this nexstar mount and if you like this configuration they actually sell it in this package as the next r5se still available at the time of filming you have the full benefits of tracking and a database of i don't know how many thousands of objects there's a lot of them in there and your final option is to go with a traditional german equatorial mount like this celestron avx the the previous version of this mount was the cg5 and they still make the cg4 as of the time of filming that's a smaller lighter version of this one and you can get away with that on a c5 and possibly even on a c6 as well again this is similar to the next r except it's already on equatorial mode and it can do astrophotography and the computer has even more thousands of objects in it and as for astrophotography i mean yeah you could do it with a c5 in practice very rarely do you see serious astro imaging done with a small schmidt caster grain like this one especially on deep sky every once in a while you'll see somebody do it but not so much but for lunar and planetary imaging you can have a lot of fun with this and in fact if you were going to get involved in astrophotography this is the branch that i would suggest you get involved with as opposed to deep sky or nightscapes all you need is a webcam planetary imagery like this one you put it in the focuser like this here is clavius here is gescendi and here is plato and if you take enough of these you can stitch them together and make lunar composites like this one and not only that some of the master imagers the people who are the best in the world at this just use simple webcam planetary imagers like this one and stock off the shelf schmidt casagrains although they usually use some of the larger ones but as to you know training yourself and getting started a c5 is going to be just fine for you okay and finally i should probably address this i'm getting a lot of questions lately about people wanting to buy five inch maxitovs asking me is this a good first telescope these five inch macs usually have the number 127 somewhere in the part number when people ask me this i usually tell them to get a c5 instead why is that a couple of reasons well first of all you can collimate a schmidt cassegrain most of those max you know they're not collimatable so whatever alignment you get out of the factory you're stuck with it the second reason is the focal length on the c5 is shorter 1250 millimeters versus 1500 millimeters plus may not sound like a big difference but with the shorter focal length it's going to yield lower magnifications which are going to make things easier to find and putting less stress on the mount to hold the telescope steady so i'm not saying don't buy the mac i'm just telling you take a look at the c5 first before you spend your money okay so just to show you how small how diminutive the c5 is here it is in comparison with most of the other currently available celestron schmidt cassegrains got the c5 on the floor here by my foot got a c6 here on the next r we have a c8 slightly modified there with an external crayford focuser we have two c9 and a quarters the base model here the edge here and we have a c11 right in front of me only model i'm missing right now is a c14 okay so don't under mount the scope i would replace the visual back if i could other than that complaints about these are pretty minor one little complaint you'll hear about this is that the dust cap has a tendency to fall off the c6 also does this and that may seem like a little thing but if you look this one is already missing i have no idea where the dust cap is and if you look back at the astronaut picture on the shuttle even they knew to duct tape the cap to the scope so other than that these are usually pretty bulletproof as long as the scope hasn't been abused in some way you can buy these used and they tend to be goodbyes so hopefully this has given you some information to determine if this scope is right for you thanks for watching and i'll see you soon

Channel: Ed Ting

Views: 31,741

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Id: IzaLr1XGjbg

Length: 13min 10sec (790 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 01 2023