Question: what is the most interesting or confusing thing you have ever seen through a telescope?

Anna Scaife answered on 20 Nov 2014:

Hey Anna – we see confusing things all the time! When you look through a telescope you can only see things from one angle and sometimes they look very strange – even when you know what they are.

There are so many interesting things in the radio sky – I find them even more interesting because they’re completely invisible in optical light and we could never see them with our eyes. Some of the things I like are… giant radio galaxies, with massive jets stretching trillions of miles, galaxies that have collided and left big streamers of gas behind them (like the “antennae” galaxies), the expanding shells of material left behind by exploded stars – we call those “supernova remnants” and they can make very bizarre shapes… so many things!