Howdy all -

Be gentle with me as I'm brand new at this astronomy thing. ;-) I bought a Zhumell Z130 telescope a few days ago and I've been having fun trying to figure out how to use it, most assuredly making some mistakes as I go along. Tonight I decided to try and scope Mars, since it's almost directly overhead. I keep reading on the internets that I should be able to make out some surface features with a telescope such as this one, but all I see is a bright round dot.

I'm using a 10mm eyepiece. I've also tried throwing a 2x Barlow into the mix and the results aren't much better. Again, as I mentioned, I know very little about astronomy, so it's entirely possible that Mars is too far away for me to see any kind of detail and it's also possible that the telescope needs to be collimated or I'm missing some other important technical detail. Heck, I may not even be looking at Mars.

I have followed advice for checking collimation by pointing at a bright star and defocusing out looking for 'concentric circles', which appears to be the case when I do so. (The second images below is my attempt to check collimation using this method.) Does anyone have any tips for me or ideas of what I might be doing wrong? These images were taken through the eyepiece with my phone, so they're not great obviously, but will hopefully get my point across.

Thanks!

https://preview.redd.it/snihze3cj7b61.jpg?width=400&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=20d59c87582e61060d7de80201705b4f190ee61a

https://preview.redd.it/ghpgxf3cj7b61.jpg?width=400&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=706155952fd0b8bc4a8cd7e502e41a35d7143c1f