Because radio waves are millions of times longer than visible light, a collecting dish of a 10-meter radio telescope might only resolve an area of sky the size of the moon.

In April, the 100-meter radio telescope Effelsberg in Germany was tied in via fiber optics to radio telescopes at Jodrell Bank in the U.K., Medicina in Italy, Onsala in Sweden and Torun in Poland.

The first complete implementation was used in 1971 on a DEC PDP-11 for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's 11-meter radio telescope in Arizona.