How to tell if a telescope is broken?

!. Can you see anything when you look through it?

2. Can you focus it? If you can focus it, it is working!

Broken? Mirrors, lenses?

When you can’t tell if the neighbor is wearing pants or not?

When Uranus is not as big as it was.

If it bucks you off, it isn’t broken.

Look through it. Frankly it’s not a very good telescope but best thing to do is to point it at a mountaintop and try to focus. Don’t be surprised it if it’s upside down. If you point it to the sky you will be able to see the moon and maybe Saturn’s rings.

@zenvelo Is it really that simple? I assumed it would take some advanced calibration to figure out!

@stanleybmanly It looked fine. But what the hell do I know?

@lucillelucillelucille Ha! Our houses are pretty close. Don’t need a telescope for that.

@ucme and @Patty_Melt Har and har.

@Caravanfan Yeah, I was in a thrift store. No mountains to be seen. :/

Ended up passing on the telescope. Too intimidated by my utter lack of knowledge. And read some reviews that agree with @Caravanfan. Not the most stellar (nyuk) telescope. Probably a good deal for $25–if it was working. Didn’t want to gamble.

Thanks for your responses though!

It’s a refractor, they’re very forgiving. Odds are it’s fine. Did you get eyepieces? They’re usually (always) junk with those. A mid range zoom eyepiece is a nice addition to a beginner scope. You should see the moon, Saturn’s rings and Jupiter’s moons with that rig.

If the stars look broken, its probably the telescope. If the daylight looks broken, its daybreak, the crack of dawn.