Celestron52291 C5 Spotting Scope 50x Magnification with 25mm Eyepiece, Multi-Coated Optics, Rubber Armored

Purchased to use as for planetary imaging. All I can say is wow. Excellent optics, well made and the case is a nice bonus.Could not notice any image shift on focusing and the focuser moves smoothly and precisely.The provided eyepiece is also surprisingly good and provides beautiful clear viewing. The astronomical views through this scope are truly beautiful.I tested for terrestrial too and the views were stunning. Able to see the colour of a birds eye from over half a mile away.This scope is an absolute bargain at the £300 with next day delivery. This is the same 5" scope as supplied with the Celestron SE, nexstar, star sense etc, and has the Celestron XLT bright coated optics.Excellent quality telescope as well as terrestrial and delivery was spot in.Cannot recommend highly enough 👌

Lovely quality telescope, arrived well collimated and gives fantastic views when the weather allows.The vinyl carry case is a lovely addition, very useful.The supplied accessories are just OK, I'm not using any of them so I can't comment on them.No idea why this is a "spotting scope", they took these up on the Space Shuttle! The one bonus is you get a limited lifetime warranty because it is.Needs a dewshield in the UK because it Dews easily, probably worth investing in a heater too.Light weight means you can mount it on almost anything.

Me : Just starting off on space exploration. Basic knowledge of astronomy.Why this scope? Researched a lot of 114mm, 127mm, 130mm telescopes with GoTo etc. These were always going to be expensive. Needed to be sure I was going to actually follow through with this hobby, without resorting to binocular. Thought this was an ideal First scope, so went for it. Not too expensive, but pretty descent.Size & Weight : Very good build quality. Quite compact and not too heavy. Comes with a handy backpack.Ease of Use: Very easy to assemble, since only two parts to fit. Controls are quite simple. Since the image through the eye-piece is not inverted, you can use it as a day scope for viewing birds, landscapes etc during the day. Being a MAK scope, for a few years at least collimating is not going to be required. Works fine right out of the box.Supplied Lenses: Definitely not enough as there is only 1 32mm eyepiece. You will need to invest in a couple of lenses at least. 2x Barlow is absolutely essential. And a 17mm or 20 mm will do nicely. Since it has 90mm mirror, too high a magnification is never going to give you a clear image, as the light is going to suffer. And with a Barlow, a 20mm will give you 10mm equivalent anyway. Also you can get a Barlow that has T2 adapter threads on it.Use with DLSR : Good news !!! You only need the T-Ring with T2 threads to use your DSLR with this. The scope already has the T-Adapter threading on it. So you don't need to buy the T-Adapter. The T-Ring can be bought for as little as £9.90 on Ebay. With the T2 threaded Barlow, you can get the 2x magnification for your camera.Stand: You will definitely need to invest in a good ALT-AZMUT tripod. Do not ever think of re-using your camera tripod. It is too light, too unstable and shaky. Also its very hard to move and track objects without the fine adjustment screw controls of a proper telescope tripod. You will definitely enjoy the scope a lot more with a good heavy duty tripod.Finding Objects in Space: Get the iPad/iPhone Apps from the app store. There are some really good ones that use your GPS location and give you a very accurate picture of the night sky when you hold up your device to the sky. It took me 30 seconds to locate Saturn yesterday, and 3 minutes to actually see it.Being a total amateur, I may have got some facts wrong. So better support this with your own research. Happy Hunting!

I downgraded from an old 4.5 inch reflector telescope as it has become the proverbial coat rack - it's just heavy for spontaneous use, especially with the British weather. This scope can be easily grabbed with one hand and taken onto my balcony table for a quick bit of bird watching (I am monitoring some city falcons). The image is clear at x25 but does dim at x75 with apparent loss of clarity, and it does require refocussing upon zooming. At x75 the image is not as sharp. But the zoom feature is convenient; the mount an intuitive and simple alt/azm (left-right and up-down); the image is not reversed or upsidedown - all of this pluses over areflector scope.For star-gazing though there is a shortcoming - there is no finderscope so it can take a few moments to have it point, say, at a bright planet, even at tle lowest magnification of x25. Googling around, I found a workaround : put an empty biro into the grove on the casing and fasten with a rubber band, but it is still not adequate e.g. for binary stars. I ended up purchasing a red-dot finder and fastening with rubber bands and blue-tack and now it is perfiectly good for lunar and planetory viewing. The moon's crators are clearly visible, Saturn's rings visible, albeit its a small disk in the eyepiece, and I managed to split the smaller of the horse-and-rider binary star. The zoom eyepiece does not support standard filters so using it to look at a full moon is uncomfortable so you may want to stick your own 1.25 eyepiece in with filter.I find the tripod just about useable; I tend to push it approximately in place (where it wobbles quite a bit) then use the fine-tune alt/azm knobs.For photographing birds I purchased a Seben camera adaptor to take pictures using a compact camera. This does not work well because the scope is so light and the adaptor, being solid metal, is too heavy such that the scope tilts back (or I risk overtightening the knobs on the tripod). I then purchaed a celestron T-ring and DSLR adapter for my Nikon D50. This worked, and especially it achieved focus (which is a known problem with other telescopes), but it is very hard to get focus (due to focus seeming to have some mechanical lag plus image on the DSLR's focussing screen looks strangely mottled). It was more practical to hold a compact to the eyepiece.Overall I'm happy because of the convenience of grabbing it now and again (and several times in an evening), but finderscope would have been nice. Do expect some degree of fuzziness at higher magnifications (above x30). In hindsight I think a Celestron Uitima may have been a better choice for me (80mm or better) as it has a sighting tube and thread for a DSLR; but I do enjoy using this and this is the final proof.

Arrived well boxed. Excellent, thank you. 👍

The telescope arrived on time. Perfect as described as by the vendor. I have been using it to shoot moon and sun so far. I love it. Attached is a closeup picture of sun with a lot of sunspots from this afternoon. Highly recommend it if you want a lighter scope to view planets and moon or birds and wildlife in the park.