$45,000 USD

Artwork Description

"For the last several years, I’ve been undertaking the most technically challenging photography series I’ve ever attempted: a project to photograph objects of unknown origin in orbit around the earth. There are roughly 350 objects in orbit around the earth whose origins are unknown. These fall roughly into two categories: 1) Objects that the US Air Force tracks on radar and publishes orbital data for; 2) Objects that both amateur astronomers and foreign sources track and observe, but that the US military does not acknowledge, presumably because these unknown objects are classified. The term “unid” is a term that amateur astronomers created to describe objects that they have observed in orbit, but whose identity they have failed to establish. Photographing these objects is extremely difficult in every way, but can be done using good data, accurate modeling, and very specific optical equipment. On any given night, I’m aiming for triple-redundancy: for each image I am using three separate telescopes to collect as much light as possible and to mitigate against any mechanical failures (which happen often). When I’ve successfully photographed the light-trail of a unid, I task the telescopes with collecting additional data from that region in the sky to fill out the photograph. Each exposure ends up being about 10,000 seconds worth of data or about 3 hours, much of which is shot with an infrared filter to highlight the various stelliferous and gaseous regions in the sky that are invisible to our eyes."