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If you found a telescope under your tree yesterday, and now here it is the next day and you still haven't figured out how to get it to work, here’s some basic advice. You've either got a reflector, which has a big mirror at the bottom of the telescope, or a refractor, usually a long tube with a big glass lens at the top. The refractor’s eyepiece, which does the magnifying, goes into the draw tube at the bottom of the scope. If you have more than one eyepiece, use the eyepiece with the biggest number - this will give you the least magnification, which is what you want to start out. You probably also have something called a Barlow lens which doubles or triples the magnification - this attachment gives you way too much magnification and makes your instrument unwieldy, so put it aside. As a general rule, don’t magnify more than 50 power for each inch of aperture, the width of your main lens or mirror.