Question: do you like working with the telescope it sounds really fun could you tell me more about what you do exactly

Anna Scaife answered on 20 Nov 2014:

Hey Anna – yes, working with radio telescopes is my single most favourite thing 🙂

There’s a whole process when you use a radio telescope: first you have to decide what to look at, and that’s pretty difficult sometimes, because there are so many exciting things out there, then you design your observation and submit it to the telescope (today I submitted two different observations). The telescope then slews across the sky until it’s pointing at your target and starts accepting data.

With radio telescopes there’s quite an art to turning those data into a good image and I spend a lot of time deciding how to do that, testing out different options and agonising over the details in my data… once you have your image you can analyse it and do some astrophysics 🙂

For the new telescope I’m helping to build, I’m in charge of the bit that turns the data into an image. The new telescope will produce so much data that this will have to happen automatically, so I get to decide how that happens 🙂