Number 113 (Story #3), February 3, 1993 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein THE VERY LONG BASELINE ARRAY (VLBA) , consisting of 10 25-m radio dishes far-flung from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands, will have an angular resolution of 0.0002 arcseconds, equivalent to that of a 8000-km-wide telescope. The headquarters for the array (which will be operational in a few months) is Socorro, New Mexico, home of the Very Large Array. With such good resolution, astronomers can get a much sharper view of galactic and quasar cores, where they hope to find something unexpected. Through the use of "phase referencing," a technique for synchronizing the different telescopes over longer periods (currently the finite precision of atomic clocks and atmospheric turbulence conspire to limit synchrony to a few minutes) by intermittently measuring a nearby reference radio source, astronomers also expect to be able to study even weakly radio-emitting objects in the Milky Way. (Science, 22 Jan.)