“When I was with Tom over 35 years ago, he got an idea from an engineer on the East Coast who had taken some mirrors to reflect sunlight into a little point of the sky where he knew a satellite was going to be,” said Lisa Pompelli, Tom’s ex-wife, who also lives in California. “He somehow got this huge team [of] Los Angeles surveyors onto the idea of helping him making this arc of mirror stations. That was one thing that was impressive about Tom, the way he could make that transfer between the art world and technology and pretty in-depth science, and then turn it into a piece of artwork.