Newbie question

[Joe7891]

Ok so last night I was out using my son's powerseeker 60 looking at stars when I decided to try and take some pictures through it with my smartphone. I was going through my pictures today and seen this one which caught my eye. My question is is it just a bad out of focus picture or did I photograph a deep sky object? I' too new to know ,and I'm just using his telescope to start to learn the sky while waiting for mine to come in. One picture is the whole photo and the other is zoomed in a little bit.

[brantuk]

The bright one is a star - all stars are dso's. The smudge below could be a more distant star or even a nebula - again both dso's. But it is deffo out of focus. The general shape and orientation in the sky could suggest M42 (Orion Nebula) under Alnitak - but really there's not enough info in the pic to be sure - unless you know you were looking at the constellation of Orion.

(Download Stellarium - it's free and a great way to know where you are looking in the sky - welcome to SGL)

[Demonperformer]

Hi, Joe, and welcome to SGL.

A telescope of any size is not really the best thing with which "to start to learn the sky". Get some sort of map of the sky - like Stellarium - and just be outside with that and your eyes. That way you will start to identify the bright stars and the constellations and from there you can start to fill in the gaps. You don't say what sort of telescope you have coming, but unless it has some means of finding the objects for you (in which case you will never need to "learn the sky"), being able to identify the main "signposts of the sky" like this will pay dividends for many years to come.