I understand the maths involved in the reconstruction to create a virtual telescope, but what boggles me (and betrays my real experience) is the sheer scale of the organisation and admin needed to get all of this together and functional.
Probably why it took Shep Doeleman more than a decade to make it happen! Years and years of proposals, talks and not a little sucking up to the right people to get the funding and observing time. Huge amounts of preparation just to get the infrastructure in place for 5 days of observations.
And all that is before you get into the intellectual feats to do anything useful with it and develop the mathematics and software to wrangle the raw data into a meaningful result!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
