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The Telescope

French astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille (1713–1762) travelled to South Africa in the mid-eighteenth century where he constructed an observatory and spent two years observing the southern skies. Not only did he catalogue nearly 10,000 southern stars, he also surveyed 42 'nebulous' objects and devised over a dozen new constellations. One of those constellations was Le Telescope which was later Latinised to Telescopium. It has also been called Tubus Astronomicus but this name is now deprecated. It is one of a number of 'modern' constellations named after scientific instruments.