Celestron C14-A OTA

4.0 C14 Classic Orange

Large aperture, excellent optics and comfortable viewing makes for pleasurable experience

Weight, weight, weight. This is a big instrument!!

After picking up a massive older Classic Celestron C-14 that needed refurbishing I finally had a chance to try out the C14 under good conditions this June evening of 2011. First I collimated the optics, not perfect but good enough for tonight. This I have to say is one massive telescope!! Being a dob man climbing up and down ladders, the first thing that I appreciated was having large aperture with exceptional optics, that tracks, and I can observe comfortably while seated. It's a great combination.

The OTA bare bones with its finder weighs in at 45 lbs. Attaching it to the massive forks is not something I would like to routinely do, as I had to have my son give me a helping hand. The triangular tripod is massive and very stable, the telescope on the dec axis has a motorized drive control, as does the RA axis. This is quite handy in centering the object once you have it locked in the FOV. It also is a nice feature to slowly slew across the moon while observing to find interesting features, without having to unlock the dec or RA axis to do so.

This scope was built in 1976, and Celestron did everything right with these older scopes. According to the original manual that came with the scope, the optics on mirror and secondary are silvered and overcoated, and both surfaces look like they just came out of the factory giving 98% reflectivity (doesn't get much better then that). The corrector is coated and the manual claims that its "special coatings" are giving 95% throughput!! Anyway what this all means is that I'm not losing that much light.

This scope held its own with DSOs in a direct comparison with my buddy's Meade 16" LX200 SCT - it was that close. So, I'm keeping this bad boy fully assembled in my garage to wheel out to my driveway. Not great skies, but good suburban skies in which I can make out all the stars of the Little Dipper. This particular evening I had my arsenal of eyepieces ready including a Meade 5K 40SWA, 34SWA, 28SWA, TV Panoptic 22mm, Meade UWA Series 4K 14mm hand grenade, and a Meade 4K UWA 8.8mm. I did not expect to be able to get much use out of the latter two, but to my surprise the view of Saturn with these 2 older Meade eyepieces were well, unreal.

Let me backtrack. I first placed the SWA 40mm low power eyepiece and checked out my first target, the moon. Amazingly this 40mm eyepiece gave me 98 power and a 0.7 degree FOV. I never saw the moon so large and detailed in such a low power eyepiece; the 34mm gave 115 power. So now I'm thinking, hey I am going to like this telescope. I can use comfortable eyepieces and have moderate power - sweet!! By now Saturn is popping out of the twilight, so in went the 22 Panoptic and I swung this monster over to Saturn. The image seems to snap into focus, never saw that before in a SCT. And the most amazing thing beside the crisp detailed image is the fact that this particular scope has almost no image shift in focusing and it holds focus from going to differing parts of the sky, unlike any other SCT I have owned in the past. OK back to Saturn - the image was detailed and crisp. I saw at least four moons, could easily see Cassini at the outer edges, the fine line shadow of the ring on the planet, and some musky banding as well. As good as that image was at 178 power with the Panoptic, I now used the Meade UWA series 4K 14mm, and the image was just jaw dropping. Using 279 power, being able to sit down comfortably at the eyepiece, I was just amazed at the image quality being observed. Saturn looked so 3D. My son's girlfriend looked at it and said it looks so good it almost looks fake. With the Meade 8.8mm 4K eyepiece at 444 power, the image did not look as sharp, but the detail was there, and fleetingly would sharpen up to give me a "wow" image. I could not stop smiling.

I finally swung the scope over to M13 and used the Meade 28mm SWA series 5K eyepiece. Spectacular! Each eyepiece showed me a little different view, but the most spectacular was with the 14mm at 279 power. The globular filled up the FOV and was being resolved to the core. It was mesmerizing. The ring nebula with the 14mm had nebulosity inside the ring. I could also clearly make out one side of the ring being brighter then the opposite side. M82, one of my favorite galaxies, showed much mottling and I can detect the dark bifurcation using the 14mm.

All in all it was a most memorable first true light with this classic old scope. My first upgrade to this scope will be adding encoders and mounting hardware that I ordered from JMI, since I already have a JMI NGC max computer that I use on my dob.