Seventeen radio telescopes around the world joined forces last week to carry out a unique observation of three distant quasars. Using an astronomical technique called electronic, real-time Very Long Baseline Interferometry (e-VLBI), the participating telescopes observed the same object simultaneously. Data from each telescope was streamed across the globe through high-speed optical networks to a correlator in the Netherlands that acted as the focus of a giant distributed telescope that was effectively the size of the Earth.