Parenting

I bought a telescope back in about 2003 (whatever year Mars had its closest approach in a century), since I've always liked astronomy. It hooks up to laptop with a USB and came with software to automate the process. Once set up, you in theory use the software to tell it where to scan the sky, and it will.

Except, I never could make it work. The instructions were virtually undecipherable. The software installed, but the process of getting the telescope's motors aligned with celestial coordinates had to be done manually, and I couldn't figure out how to do it from the crappy manual.

I've looked at the moon a few times by manually sighting through it, but planets and stars are too small to find that way for the most part. So it sits in the basement.