As part of his training to join the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI), Richard Doty was taught how to recruit spies, conduct and resist interrogations, run surveillance operations, and organize and manage deception and disinformation campaigns. After graduation, he was assigned to Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, NM. During his active yearsContinue reading “Doty”
Category Archives: Celestial Objects
Palladium Variation #4
In late October, 1962 an American fighter jet out of Key West screamed south towards Havana Bay. The reaction was almost immediate: the Cuban military scrambled a pair of interceptors and raced north to meet the intruder. Just as the American jet neared the coastline, it banked north, flying impossibly fast and remaining just outContinue reading “Palladium Variation #4”
UNIDS
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 USContinue reading “UNIDS”
The Other Night Sky
This is an ongoing project to track and photograph the world of secret satellites that are above our heads nearly constantly. Although the satellites I track and photograph in this series are not typically acknowledged by the United States, they are cataloged and observed by an international network of amateur “satellite observers,” whose observations IContinue reading “The Other Night Sky”
The Fence
In 1979, astronomer W. T. “Woody” Sullivan worked with two undergraduates at the University of Washington to publish a now-classic paper entitled “Eavesdropping: The Radio Signature of Earth.” Sullivan et al. found that the brightest continuous signals emanating from earth came from military radar systems designed to detect ballistic missiles and track satellites in earth orbit,Continue reading “The Fence”
Orbital Reflector
Produced in collaboration with the Nevada Museum of Art, Orbital Reflector is a sculpture constructed of a lightweight and highly-reflective polyethylene material housed in a small box-like satellite bus. The satellite was meant to be inserted into orbit and after a few days deploy the reflective structure, creating a 100m long diamond-shaped mirror to reflect sunlightContinue reading “Orbital Reflector”
Nonfunctional Satellites
The “nonfunctional satellites” are sculptures designed to be placed into low-earth orbit where they will appear as bright points of light slowly moving across the sky to viewers on earth’s surface. They are designed to last for only a few weeks before burning up in the atmosphere. Developed in collaboration with aerospace engineers, the designsContinue reading “Nonfunctional Satellites”
Demonstration of Eating, Licking, and Drinking
This is one of my all-time favorite images. When I showed it to filmmaker Werner Herzog, he concurred and added that he believed it belonged “next to the Mona Lisa.” Demonstration of Eating, Licking, and Drinking was produced by a team of scientists at Cornell University to be included on the Voyager Golden Record, aContinue reading “Demonstration of Eating, Licking, and Drinking”
The Last Pictures
This project was inspired by an image that came from my work tracking secret satellites. Over the course of my work on satellites, I realized that certain kinds of satellites – those in geosynchronous orbits – experience virtually no drag from the atmosphere below and consequently stay in orbit for extremely long amounts of timeContinue reading “The Last Pictures”
The X-37B
The American Air Force’s secretive X-37B space-plane-drone is back after it’s fifth mission in orbit. There’s some controversy about whether it deployed an array of small secret satellites in violation of the United Nations’ Registration Convention, which says that all countries have to report on the satellites they put into orbit. I photographed the X-37BContinue reading “The X-37B”