hi this is graham from jenham's astro if you look at my channel you find a few videos of
this telescope the sky max 127 and a few of this one the celestron c5 i had a few comments to say
could i make a comparison video so this is my first attempt at comparing the two scopes
looking at specs very quickly both the same kind of aperture 127, 125 mm,
the Maksutov is an f12 design the c5 is an f10 this one tips the scales at about three
and a half kilos this one at about two and a half this one's two years old this one's 40 years old
okay let's wait for it to get dark and see if we can compare the two scopes performance
so this is the setup i'm going to use got each scope on an altars mount
i've got an asi 224 planetary camera in the back of the focuser if necessary we'll barlow
the scopes but we'll start off like this and as with all astro
i'm playing around during the day time to make sure i've got everything set up
okay same again with the c5 got the scope pointed at my trusty target infinity which is a
tree a long way off maybe a mile off on top of the hill
and i'm getting the focus position sorted out during the day using fire capture
quick collimation check before we carry on starting with the c5
rolling the focus through the central position pattern looks pretty good nice central star
i think that's good enough for our purposes
and then moving on to the 127 different pattern as you would expect from the mac
looks a bit different either side of focus but again central star nice concentric rings
and here's a sort of quick snapshot of the summary i think we're good enough to go i never spend
ages on collimation some people might tell me i should but that's what we're going to start with
so keep looking up this is polaris as seen on fire capture using the c5 and if we zoom in a bit and
if we put the gain up we get a pretty clear view of the secondary which is quite a lot of fainter
just uh bright slightly brighter than magnitude 9. image of polaris isn't great but not bad
same again with the 127 slightly crisper image of polaris itself a little bit of wind
nice capture of the secondary
and there's both side by side pole star easy split on both
okay polaris doesn't move but after a bit of trial and error i've decided to go to the
equatorial mount to continue looking at other double stars
so let's take a look around the spring sky firstly we're going to go to the hunting
dogs and have a look at cor caroli the brightest star in canes venatici
and what i've got is the two uh videos from the c5 and the 127 side by side
taken from the asi 224 no barlow in this case and in fact generally no barlow in this video
nice split not much colour to be seen, wide separation
and then very famous star mizar almost overhead famous as a visual double
with alcor but looking at mizar itself itself is a double star very famous one
and here are the still images this time i've taken the video and produced a still image
from each of the telescopes so mizar again slightly smaller separation than cor caroli
but nice easy split as you would expect not a lot of color to be seen generally it's quite hard to
to render colour i've found in the videos you can see sometimes more color with your naked eye
and off to leo so we're going to look at algieba i might
pronounce that incorrectly there's gamma leonis
this case we're we're seeing a much closer double so the separation of these two is down at four
seconds still quite a way above the theoretical ability of these scopes to to split stars
and you can just about see the image scale difference between the f12 and the f10 slightly
more separation on the 127 but a nice clean split
in both cases a little bit of yellow on one of the stars but that's about it
moving on to gemini castor is the
the less bright of the two twins high overhead in the spring sky still early in the evening
i tried using a two times barlow on this but tried on a couple of nights and i couldn't
really get a good steady image that i was happy with so i went back to just using the camera
directly into the back of the telescope and this is the result so four 4.8 arc second
split well within the capability of this size of telescope once again not really any color evident
um in this particular binary but looks great through the eyepiece it really does
and then finally headed off to iota cancri this star is known as the winter alberio and i think
we'll see in a minute why it's compared to that star in the constellation of cygnus
so this is the video from each of the two scopes not super obvious from the video but you can see
quite a lot of color you get a distinct difference between the yellow orange or the primary
and the blue of the secondary and that color is more obvious when you process
the video when you stack it into a still image and there you go that is i think it's a really
lovely style lovely target wide separation really nice color visually and with the camera
okay i think that's enough double stars for the time being to make some kind of comparison
sometimes i have to kind of stop trying to capture some video
through the telescope in order to make a youtube video and maybe just look through the eyepiece of
the scope and give you my own impressions. so i've done that i've put the camera away and i've just
looked through a good quality eyepiece i'm using my vixen slv eyepiece putting the magnification
up and going from one scope to the other scope now everything is equal same aperture
both your scopes are fully cooled down and going from one to the other on the same night
and making a visual comparison and i'd have to say the 127 has the edge but really not by very much
i expect if i do another video where we get to look at planetary comparison then perhaps the 127
will show a little bit more of a gap in terms of improvement versus the c5 certainly the accepted
view is that contrast is going to be better in the mac and the f12 versus the f10 but they're
both the same aperture both the same doors limit and i'd say on these double stars there
really isn't a great deal to split between the two scopes 127 slightly ahead but not by a huge amount
after personalities if you can assign one of those to a telescope i'd say c5 feels like fun
it says grab and go take me outside and let's look at some targets it's really really light
nice package the 127 i think is fantastic value for money really even still with the crazy prices
the things moving up and down in the world at the moment is still a great value package but it is a
more serious beast you pick it up it's heavier it says let's go and do some serious work it's quite
different but the results based on this comparison not hugely separating the two scopes okay i
hope it's been useful i will try to do another comparison video between these two because i know
they are they're questions that come up quite a lot and they're both popular scopes you can still
buy the c5 as a spotting scope and obviously a lot of people using the 127 so i'll try to make some
more videos but uh if you haven't subscribed to Jenham's Astro and you want to look out for those
then please press the subscribe button now and i hope it's been useful so thanks for watching.