This being the International Year of Astronomy and the big 400
telescope anniversary, many people are claiming the invention before
Hans Lippershey in 1608.

Leonardo da Vinci wrote about the telescope in his notebooks one
century before they became widely known and available. Whether he
actually built and used one is a subject of controversy, but is anyone
too terribly surprised that he would have thought of the idea?

His notebook entry reads:

“to see the Moon enlarged… and …in order to observe the nature of the planets, open the roof and bring the image of a single planet onto the base of a concave mirror. The image of the planet reflected by the base will show the surface of the planet much magnified.”

Sounds like a telescope to me.

And Europeans knew about eyeglasses since the Middle Ages, so the
idea of lenses for magnify objects was not unknown.