Usually I write about birds and hiking here, but I thought I would write a few posts as I travel to Russia for some work on radio astronomy.
At least two strands appear in the evolution of astronomical instruments. The first is magnification. Galileo pointed a telescope at the sky and observed that the moon had mountains, craters, and flat plains that look like oceans. His telescope magnified the moon and showed him features invisible to the unaided eye. The second strand is light-gathering capacity. Nearly 2 centuries later, William Herschel and his sister Caroline Herschel realized that a large mirror can concentrate light, and so make visible to the eye many sky objects that are otherwise too faint detect. Using the "space-pentrating power" of their large telescopes, they discovered new nebulae, comets, galaxies and the planet Uranus. Today, most large optical telescopes have magnification only a few times that of Galileo's instruments: but much greater light-gathering capacity.
Magnification of a telescope is limited by many factors, among them the diameter. Light is a wave and will bend, to some degree, when it encounters an obstacle. At the aperture of a telescope, that bending blurs the image. This limits the useful magnification of the telescope: beyond a certain degree of magnification the wave nature of light blurs the image, an effect called diffraction. The larger the telescope's diameter, the less bending imposed, and the greater magnification attainable.
With years of effort, Russian scientists have built a radio telescope to be launched into a high orbit. In combination with radio telescopes on Earth, it will provide an effective diameter of nearly the distance to the moon: about 25 times the diameter of the Earth. It will thus allow us to view details about one-ten-millionth the resolution of the eye: the highest yet attained by any instrument. But, because the orbiting telescope is small, the light-gathering capacity will not be particularly impressive.
So, what's there to see with such high mangification, despite relatively poor light-gathering capacity? Primary targets are the black holes at the centers of galaxies, and pulsars. The black holes are very small, as small or smaller than the resolution of the artificial lens; and easily bright enough to detect; but the clouds of radio-wave-emitting gas surrounding them may be so extended that little detail is visible. Or so says theory. Stay tuned to learn whether the enormous telescope penetrates the gas shrouding these black holes!
Pulsars, on the other hand, are small and their radio emission is emitted from a small region. Some are strong, and some occasionally emit very bright pulses. In principle, detecting them should be a cinch! Understanding the results may be a little more tricky, though. I'm hoping to help out with this part of the project. Again, stay tuned for results!

Here I am, in 2008, with Radioastron, the machine to be launched into orbit. I was visiting the Lavotchkin Association outside Moscow, where the spacecraft was constructed. (This same factory also contructed the Russian lunar rovers and probes that landed on Venus, among other spacecraft.) I was a member of a group of scientists attending a meeting about Radioastron, who were invited to visit this factory.
My travel to Russia, and my work on the Radioastron project, are supported in part by the US National Science Foundation.