Question: do you enjoy using a telescope?

Jen Gupta answered on 15 Jun 2011:

I love looking through telescopes at the Moon or the planets or stars. I think one of my favourite times was the first time I saw Saturn through a telescope. This was only last year and it was amazing to see the rings!

The telescopes I use for my work however are different to the telescopes you are probably used to seeing. Radio telescopes are big dishes that we use to collect the radio waves. These days we tend to build lots of small dishes and then use computers to combine the signals together. X-ray and gamma-ray telescopes tend to be in space because the atmosphere stops most of the x-rays and gamma-rays coming through.

I don’t tend to get to actually go and use telescopes – so many people have already looked at the sky with telescopes that I can normally find the galaxies I want to look at in their images. So instead I will download data from the website of an observatory and analyse that. I wish I got to go to a telescope each time! I did get to go to a telescope called the GMRT in India a couple of years ago and that was awesome! I didn’t actually get to control the telescope (they employ people to do that) but I did sit in the control room and went for a walk and looked at the dishes while they were looking at the galaxies I told them to!