Telescope Reviews: Celestron C5+ owners- your experiences

While I tend to not use anything but my C14 for planets anymore, I have compared the planetary performance of the C5 to many scopes over the years and it is a better planetary scope than many people (can you say "Refractor?") would believe.

The view is to me only oh so very slighly less contrasty than in a 4" APO, but the image is so much brighter that it makes up for the difference.

I use a Meade Prism. I have used a Tak prism on it in the past, but honestly I could not really see any meaningful difference and I hated the nylon compression ring in the Tak, so went back to the Meade prism, which appears to be of reasonable quality.

I tend to use a variety of eyepeices in it, but mostly 11mm Plossl and Meade 8.8 UWA for planets.

For the moon, I can go to the 7mm T6 Nagler.

The C5 does very well on Saturn, showing the primary rings and Cassini easily but the Crepe is difficult except at very low powers.

Mars will show the polar cap almost always, and you can see albedo features on the disk, so you know that there are details, but the contrast is not high enough for much resolution.

Jupiter will show all of the larger details easily but festoons are a bit out of reach unless they are quite pronounced. Shadow transits are excellent in the C5, 100% as good as in the best 4" APOs I have owned, but these features start with very high contrast, so they still look very black in the C5. The disk of the moons that made them will not really be visible when they are in front of the Jovian disk, and you won't likely ever see any ovals that are not at least 3 or 4 arc seconds in diameter, on Jupiter but these are really a bit out of the reach of small apertures unless the observer has excellent contrast sensitivity.

GRS is pretty easy, as are the major belts and even some structure in the belts from time to time.

The moon to me is also as good in the C5 as in my 4" refractors. Again, much of the detail on the moon starts with sufficient contrast (shadow detail) that it still looks great in the C5, and some of the finer detail like the structure of the Triesnecker Rille system stands out as well as in a 4" APO because the resolution is slighly better and the added brightness allows a bit more magnification which helps with the smallest angular detail.

But for the faintest possible detail I think a 4" refractor could show a bit more, but only a bit. Sometimes a festoon would be hinted at in my 4" APO and not be visible at all in the C5. Of course these festoons will usually be easy in a large scope at just about any power, but they can be a challange for a good APO, and just out of reach of a C5. The contrast is very low to start with, and the C5 just looses a bit to much to reach into that kind of large, low contrast detail. This is the weak point of the C5. Large, very low contrast structure like festoons will be just out of reach.

In summary, a lot of 4" and smaller refractors have come and gone but the C5 remains. Not that it is a better plantery scope, but it is good enough to provide some decent small aperture observing, and I didn't like keeping so much money tied up in little refractors.

But neither the C5 or a 4" (or even a 6") APO would not be my first choice for a planetary scope.

Still, it is amazing how much you can see with a C5.

I recently put my Binoviewr on my C5. Was a lot of fun for low power observing. I was able to get a wider true field than when using the binoviewer in my 6" APO!

So you can see almost as much as with a 4" APO if your scope has good optics. Only the lowest contrast detail will escape you, and since a lot of this detail is not visible in any small aperture, you aren't missing much as compared to a lot of other small scopes.