telescope
n. countablen. a tube-shaped tool that uses lenses or mirrors to make distant objects look closer and larger. You use it to look at things in the sky like stars and planets.
n. an optical instrument designed to make distant objects appear nearer, containing an arrangement of lenses, or of curved mirrors and lenses, by which rays of light are collected and focused and the resulting image magnified.
I used a telescope to see the craters on the moon.
The amateur astronomer spent hours in his backyard adjusting his telescope to get a clear view of Saturn's rings.
Modern observatories often house a massive reflecting telescope on a remote mountaintop to minimize atmospheric interference and capture light from the furthest reaches of the observable universe.
From tele- + -scope. From Latin tēlescopium, from Ancient Greek τηλεσκόπος (tēleskópos, “far-seeing”), from τῆλε (têle, “afar”) + σκοπέω (skopéō, “I look at”). Coined in 1611 by the Greek mathematician Giovanni Demisiani for one of Galileo Galilei's instruments presented at a banquet at the Accademia dei Lincei. Doublet of Telescopium.
Commonly takes the preposition 'through' when describing the act of looking.