I recently treated myself to a spotting scope as my birthday present.  It is something you would use to look at objects from a long distance, particularly animals or birds, and it really allows you to see clearly over considerably longer distances than a pair of binoculars would.  It differs from a telescope, which is more suited to see things at night, but you could if you wanted, use it to look at the moon and stars, etc – but that is not what it is designed for.  There is even a form of photography now where people specialise in taking those types of long distance photographs and attaching their cameras to the spotting scopes.  That type of photography is known as digiscoping and what was surprising for me, and I know quite a bit about cameras and photography, is that many of those close-up photographs that you see of birds and small animals are not actually taken with zoom lenses – they are taken by attaching the camera to a spotting scope – or in other words, a super powered pair of binoculars.  

The detail you can see, on something a mile away, is quite dramatic but not exactly the stuff that top photographs are made of.  Training it on a tree, about 100 metres away, will give you stunning clarity of the pines, bark, cones and any bird sitting on the tree as well.  Obviously, to use something like this, as with good photography, requires a tripod.  You cannot possibly train something over such a distance on an object and keep it as still as you need to without a tripod.