Classifier_66

Would it be safe since the sun is around? And just eyeballing it an ok method or should I be using the co ordinate system?

Sorry for the newbie question, but whenever I aim at stars with my celestron starpointer, I find nothing. The only star I was able to find was Betelgeuse after 30 minutes of slowly moving my telescope near it. Am I supposed to move the telescope a bit up to compensate that the pointer is a bit more up than the telescope? Should the red dot be directly pointing at the star? Am I doing this completely wrong?