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Being a 3D-printing novice, I was once somewhat skeptical of the promise behind what’s being billed as a truly game-changing technology. I saw Makerbot CEO Bre Pettis on the cover of Wired in late September, and while the novelty of the process incited wonder in my inner 10-year-old, I didn’t think much about it after the fact.

Enter Cody R. Wilson. Wilson is a 25-year-old University of Texas law student working to build semiautomatic weapons using 3D printers. His name first came up in conversation with a colleague after Wilson posted an Indiegogo pitch video demonstrating his intended use for a newly-acquired Stratasys 3D printer, which Stratasys subsequently repossessed.

I was intrigued. Wilson seemed to be an articulate and tech-savvy mouthpiece for a movement that a large portion of the country would deem dangerous and off-limits. To find out more about his fight against gun control, we flew down to his home base of Austin, Texas, where we first met Wilson at his apartment. I wasn’t sure what to make of him. He checked his phone every 10 seconds. He had a hard time making eye contact. Every other sentence ended with “Do you know what I mean?” He spoke on topics ranging from progress in the 3D-printed gun movement to American politics to the inherent revolutionary nature of bitcoins.

• For more on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearm’s stance on 3D-printed guns, check out this piece by Motherboard’s Adam Clark Estes. 

Soon enough Wilson showed us the CAD file on his computer for his lower receiver. Over us, a five-foot American flag hung as a self-described ironic statement. He’s a knowledgeable guy, and spoke at length about the development of Defense Distributed’s lower receiver, telling me that failure was a part of the scientific process. As he said, every time one of his designs fails, it offers more insight into what designs work.

Social niceties aside, we were there to watch Wilson build some guns. To be clear, Defense Distributed doesn’t print entire guns–at least not yet. Instead, Wilson’s team focuses on printing AR-15 lower receivers, which house most of the operating parts of that firearm.

It is also the part of the gun that’s considered a gun by the government. Other parts like barrels and stocks, especially those for the highly-modular AR-15 platform, can be purchased online, and often with no age restriction or background check needed.

Wilson is also focused on 3D printing 30-round magazine clips in anticipation of Senator Dianne Feinstein’s assault weapon ban bill, which would limit magazine size. To Wilson, the work is partly an effort to expose what he considers the futility of gun regulation. “[Magazines] prove the point much better than the lower receiver that you can’t ban a box and a spring,” he said.

Printing a lower receiver takes seven hours, but there is something particularly ominous about seeing the ARS plastic begin to take shape as the lower receiver is born.

Whatever your thoughts on gun control, it’s impossible to deny that the 3D-printed gun movement is something that doesn’t fit into the current legal framework. It’s either exciting or scary–or perhaps both–and that polarity is something Wilson recognizes, and which he knows how to bend to his advantage. It all made for a rather confusing week in Texas, during which we were often alone with just Wilson, who appears to have few distractions outside of his work with Defense Distributed. He’s created his own world in this mission, where friends or law school grades take a backseat to the message.

It’s impossible to know where that mission will end, but just as it’s clear that 3D printing is set to boom, it’s clear that Wilson and company have changed the boundaries of what that boom will bring.

I once saw a UFO. It was a fairly standard experience. The craft was cigar shaped, silver, and it slid silently across a clear blue sky. No abduction, no lost time, no probes.

The sighting occurred at Devil’s Tower–you know, that natural wonder in Wyoming that Richard Dreyfuss carved out of mashed potatoes in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I was holding a video camera but when I hit record and swung it toward the sky the mysterious craft had vanished. The year was 1993; I was 11 years old.

It’s been about twenty years since that day, and at this point in my life I consider myself skeptical but willing to keep an open mind when it comes to the subject of extraterrestrials. This particular outlook makes me an ideal visitor to the UFO Watchtower, according to its owner, Judy Mesoline.

Built to resemble a UFO, Mesoline’s watchtower is a strange little museum, shop, and lookout post that she opened in 2001 after a failed stint as a rancher. It’s located in Hooper, Colorado, a small town even by Colorado standards. As of 2011 it had a population of 105.

Mesoline’s bizarre totem to alien sightings isn’t just capitalizing on an otherworldly trend that stretches across the American west. It turns out that Hooper sits right in the middle of what one fellow visitor referred to as “The Bermuda Triangle of The West”.

The San Luis Valley, a geothermal swath of land at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, and home to Hooper and the UFO Watchtower, also happens to be the site of an unusual number of UFO sightings, a home to many true believers, and ground zero for the unexplained animal mutilation epidemic. It was here in 1967 that the first known mutilation took place, on a now-legendary horse named Snippy.

Since she opened her lookout in 2001, Mesoline has had over two dozen sightings of her own.

“So many bizarre things have happened here in the last 12 years and I tell folks you better have an open mind,” she said. “Maybe you don’t quite get all of this, okay? But you’d better have an open mind because something’s going on up there in that cosmos that we just don’t know about.”

See? Maybe I’m not so crazy.

Produced by Erin Lee Carr and edited by Chris O’Coin. Follow us at @Motherboard and on Facebook, and sign up for our newsletter. 

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Enter Robert Alexander, a classically trained composer who has always been fascinated with the sky. As Robert was thinking about his thesis he determined that he was interested in the practice of sonification. For those of you who are unfamiliar, sonification is defined simply as is the process of displaying data in an audio format (other than traditional speech). Robert was interested in listening to data and garnering what he and the world can learn from it. We go into it deeper in the piece but I thought of it as such a novel idea. One thinks that most problems have a linear solution but that is not the world we live in, there can and always will be another and maybe more creative way of finding the solution.

Please read the Motherboard copy below.

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Sonification is a simple concept: translating information into sound. A synthesizer could be considered a form of sonification: taking a predetermined electrical frequency and mating it with a speaker to possibly pleasurable result–or at least interestingly unpleasurable. Just that is one of the best things ever, and by screwing around with those frequencies, usually adding or subtracting them, we can make just about any sound imaginable. Just by playing around with some numbers, you can make a violin, handclap, human voice, guitar, or really anything else.

We’ve figured out over a fairly recent history that most anything in the universe can be made audible as long as it has associated data/numbers. And, of course, anything you can think of does (brain waves, pulsars, whatever). A generated electrical frequency isn’t quite the same thing as solar wind, but there’s good reason one can be made into sound and the other can’t. It’s just a matter of translation. In doing so, we can hear the universe. Sometimes this adds to our appreciation, or gives us a way of experiencing something distant in the cosmos that otherwise we might just have to conceptualize through diagrams, or through the words of scientists.

Coronal Mass Ejections, giant bubbles of magnetically-charged gas from the sun, disrupt the flow of the solar wind and produce disturbances that strike the Earth with sometimes catastrophic results. They occur at least once a week; this CME captured by SOHO occured on April 7th, 1997

To sonify, then, is to make beauty available to our human senses–a way to understanding but also, through the work of artist and NASA fellow Robert Alexander, a means to discovery. For three years, Alexander has worked with the University of Michigan’s Solar Heliospheric Research Group, in a project he concocted, sonifying the sun using data captured by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a NASA/ESA spacecraft that for 17 years has been staring at the sun, providing our most reliable source of near real-time data about solar weather. He’s rendered solar flares as a human choir, and turned the sun’s rotation into a a tribal beat.

The result isn’t just good music. After noticing a particular hum in his sonification, Alexander eventually pointed the way to a discovery: using sound is a great way to detect carbon levels, which is in turn are useful for measuring the temperatures of solar flares–those fantastic bursts of energy from our star that can disrupt radio communications, electrical grids, and satellites here on Earth. The resulting paper was published last year in the Astrophysical Journal, and helped earn Alexander another year in his NASA fellowship.

In this episode of Spaced Out, Motherboard visited Alexander in his lab at the University of Michigan to learn about how sonification is cracking the universe open. “I think of myself as an explorer,” he says. “I live in the space between art and science and technology.” Arguably, it’s one of the most crucial and developing spaces in knowledge.

Produced by Erin Lee Carr (@erinleecarr); edited by Chris O’Coin (@ocoin).

See more Spaced Out episodes:

The Satellite Hunter

Meet the Guy Who Hunts Space Bears in Rural Virginia

Inside NASA’s Last Undersea Mission to Save Earth from an Asteroid 

Open Source Outer Space: How a Couple of Guys Are Building a Homemade Rocket Ship for the Masses

Thierry Legault is not your average amateur astronomer, inviting the kids over and pointing a dinky backyard telescope at the Big Dipper. He’s a renowned astrophotographer, painstakingly chronicling the orbits of planets, distant galaxies, spaceships, and—to the chagrin of the intelligence community—of the spy satellites we’re not supposed to see.

These days, we are inundated with a constant feed of reality defying images sent back to us from space by the very carefully calibrated equipment we send up there. But for Thierry, the act of capturing space is a much more personal process. It’s man versus nature.

And upon our rainy arrival at Charles de Gaulle Airport, there she was. As we looked up on the cold and rainy Friday of our arrival in Paris, looking forward to a fantastic voyage of space, the sky thundered its response.

In order to capture a planetary passing, a satellite, or a shuttle, Thierry often travels thousands of miles to the far reaches of the Earth, often in a race with time and weather, and he often fails. “It is not funnest part of the game, driving, and trying to find clear skies, but when it is successful, it is more rewarding,” Theirry says.

Ultimately, weather and timing matter, but so does technology. The very logistics of capturing these fleeting moments themselves tend to involve complex calculations and the help of sophisticated camera and telescope tracking technologies. He often doesn’t actually see the moments in space he photographs because he’s looking at his watch.

International Space Station transiting the sun

Veil Nebula, NGC 6992

A close-up on Omega Centauri, with numerous very small galaxies.

He is of course not alone in his quest to photograph our universe. We met up with him at the Meeting of Sky and Space at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie Congress, a massive event that takes place every two years to address how we look at space. Thierry was there to deliver a keynote lecture on the science and future of satellite-tracking and amateur astronomy. In the past decades, the field has revolutionized by digital equipment that can, for instance, help him follow tiny spy satellites as they zip across the sky, or simply help discover camera or telescope problems in real time.

“With a film camera the main disadvantage was you didn’t have the result immediately, but the day after or the week after,” he said. “So now with a digital camera, which is much more sensitive than film, we have the results right now so if the image is blurred or under exposed or over exposed or any kind of problem, we can correct the problem immediately. And so the learning curve for a beginner is much, much faster than before.”

Thierry’s work has appeared in the Guardian, CNN and Popular Science, and seen around the world. His name is synonymous with astrophotography, and he has the distinction of being the first person in the world to spot the Air Force’s miniature space shuttle, the X-37B, during its secret missions, apparently over Afghanistan, in 2011.

The spy organizations of the world—led by the US, which has more satellites in space than any nation—carefully guard the orbits of their classified spacecraft, machines that may be capable of seeing objects as small as perhaps 10 cm (4 inches) across on Earth. That makes Thierry and other amateur satellite-trackers around the planet a tiny thorn in the side of their intelligence effort. Still, he’s not very worried about becoming the subject of a clandestine satellite’s camera.

Ground-based images of three different classified US satellites: the X-37B mini space shuttle, the USA-186 Keyhole, and the LaCrosse 3. (Credit: Thierry Legault and Emmanuel Rietsch).

“We know their trajectory, their orbital data, and we take images with some details,” he said. “But we can’t discover really the capabilities of these satellites. So it’s more like a game,” he said with a laugh, “spying spy satellites.”

Still the passion that Thierry throws into his masterful combination of science and art transcends the technicalities of space and politics. “I photograph satellites because it’s difficult, it’s kind of a challenge with myself. Each time I say ‘can you succeed or not?’ and ‘next time, can you do better? Can you do another satellite, something else, something more difficult?’ So it’s a way to improve my skill with a telescope. It’s like a game or a challenge.”

Thierry with an automatic telescope rig

He savors the philosophical questions too, wondering as he looks up who else—besides the CIA—is looking back down. “When you look at a galaxy and you know that this galaxy is composed of hundreds of billions of stars and around all these stars, like the sun, there are many planets, and perhaps someone, who knows, who is watching us.”

In an age where our images of space come from images and reconstituted data streamed from machines launched by large corporations and NASA-sized organizations—and a future of spaceplanes and entrepreneurs promises to open space to everyone—Thierry Legault remains a lone wolf, a star hunter and satellite tracker who relies on his own methods for making fantastic voyages way beyond Earth.

The full celestial vault, taken with a particular lens covering 180° (fisheye) from the Carnarvon National Park (Queensland), with the Milky Way (our Galaxy) in its brightest part passing near the zenith with the constellations (from left to right): Carina, Centaurus, Southern Cross, Scorpio, Sagittarius (galactic center), Aquila.

At Wallaman Falls, between Townsville and Cairns, in north Queensland, the Full Moon enlightens the landscape and its light, combined with the water of the fall, creates a Moonbow. A bright shooting star crosses the Milky Way during the exposure.

See more of Thierry’s spectacular photographs on his website, check out a video of the LaCrosse’s “disappearance trick” on his YouTube channel, and watch more episodes of Motherboard’s Spaced Out

Follow us @motherboard, @erinleecarr and on Facebook.