n. The act of penetrating or piercing.n. Power of penetrating; specifically, in gunnery, the depth a projectile will pass into any material against which it is fired.n. Mental acuteness; discernment; insight: as, a man of extraordinary penetration.n. In optics: Of a microscope objective, its power of giving fairly distinct vision for points both inside and outside of its exact focus.n. Of a telescope, its space-penetrating power, as Herschel called it—i. e. the number of times by which the distance of an observed star might be increased while still appearing of the same brightness in the telescope as it does to the naked eye. It is proportional to the square root of the illuminating power, and for an achromatic telescope is approximately equal to four times its aperture in inches.