The tripod was near invisible in the darkness. A red LED flashlight, limning the iOptron SkyTracker in dull, dark crimson, was my only means of distinguishing my astrophotography equipment against the landscape. The community gardens sloped away on all sides; the ground, I knew from having to navigate the rough dirt path on my bicycle, was littered with fat heads of lettuce and sprays of snow-peas and slightly sunken tomatoes whose colors and textures in daylight were precise and sharp but by night were wrapped in shadow, little more than vague silhouettes at the far edges of the field. A tallgrass prairie carpeted the crest of the hill, long stalks half as tall as the tripod sweeping against each other until the hillside sounded with a fibrous, granular trembling, like a broom's bristles dragged across a brick floor.

Tossed between two lakes, the wind that breathed over the gardens varied between quiet sighs and great gasps, at times gentle enough to pass unnoticed and at others strong enough to wobble the tripod, upsetting the long-exposure imaging being done by the camera. On that particular night, what began as clear, lacquer-like skies, the stars as sharp as shards of chipped glass, grew steadily more opaque as the wind carried across the lake, until the faint airglow from the city pollution and the high, thin cloud blended together in a wheaty blur across my long exposure astrophotographs.

Astrophotography is the practice of imaging the night sky, either with a wide-angle lens to capture the diaphanous swath of Milky Way arcing from horizon to horizon, or with a narrow lens, and its long focal length, to bring into focus the faint, dusky disks of distant galaxies or nebulae diffused with smoky pink and gold from the torches of the stars around it. There are a plethora of different techniques and styles, equipment upgrades and camera modifications, that distinguish the various types of astrophotographs; a throughline across this diversity of practice, however, is the need for long exposure time, derived from a slow shutter speed, that allows the camera to capture the night sky's still points of light while blurring, smearing, or obscuring the moving elements.

Consequently, an astronomer's relationship with the wind is something of a fraught one. For the amateur astrophotographer, a still, steady base—such as that offered by a large tripod as well as a counterweight to compensate for larger cameras and lenses—is essential to guard against the possibility of environmental disturbances affecting the sensor, ensuring the rig remains immobile during long exposure work. On the ground, vibrations from the wind can cause optical errors and visual distortions, but the wind also influences atmospheric turbulence at higher altitudes. For example, the team behind the Giant Magellan Telescope, what will be the world's most powerful optical-infrared telescope, currently under construction in Chile, has used wind data from the Gemini South Telescope atop Cerro Pachón to adjust and adapt to the wind flow around the seven 8-meter mirrors.¹ Rendered variable "partly by airflow over rough surfaces, partly by wind shear in free air, and partly by buoyancy forces," the index of astronomical "seeing" affects the capacity of photographers to capture the fainter details of astronomical targets.² The index of transparency accounts for the visibility and viewability of astronomical objects despite the accumulation of dust, smoke, and light pollution in the atmosphere. The index of "seeing," however, is determined by the propagation of electromagnetic waves which, when passing through a heterogeneous medium like windy or turbulent air, experiences scattering by the medium's refractive elements, resulting in amplitude and phase fluctuations that register as blurry or bloated stars in an astrophotograph.³

In Opticks, Isaac Newton recognized the impact made by air, atmosphere, and wind on the instrumental capacities of practical astronomy. He writes on the limitation of lenses on Earth due to the fact that "the Air through which we look upon the Stars, is in a perpetual Tremor... thereby [causing] the Star to appear broader than it is."⁴ In order to circumvent atmospheric turbulence and wind shear influencing the astronomical "seeing" index, Newton expressly proposed placing "Long Telescopes" in environments surrounded by "serene and quiet Air, such as may perhaps be found on the tops of the highest Mountains above the grosser Clouds."⁵ Newton anticipated what has become the industry standard for large observatories like Las Campanas Observatory in the southern Atacama Desert, the future home of the Giant Magellan Telescope.⁶ In short, constructing telescopes in locations with exceptional "seeing" indexes, usually high altitudes far above "frequently occurring temperature inversion layers, where the prevailing winds have crossed many miles of ocean," and therefore free of the associated turbulence and consequent diminished clarity.⁷

However, this articulation of astronomy shapes wind and atmosphere into barrier-like interfaces, inhibiting studies of the stars. Moreover, the separation of planetary systems and extraplanetary subjects directly plays into justification for seizing and occupying sacred Indigenous land in the name of scientific investigation, perhaps the most visible example being the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawai'i. A high, dry altitude like the summit of Mauna Kea, whose "close proximity to the equator makes both hemispheres viewable," has long been prized for observatories and telescopes because the high opacity and low turbulence of the air are less likely to interfere with observational instrumentation and the measurement of infrared and submillimeter radiation from celestial sources.⁸ Mauna Kea's dark, clear skies were well documented before institutions like the University of Hawai'i, Caltech, the Lowell Observatory, and the United States Air Force constructed telescopes on its summit. "Native Hawaiians had for centuries known it as a place to observe their own cosmology," Native Hawaiians who have been subsequently dispossessed of their sacred land by the scientific and academic institutions that concurrently erase the longstanding Indigenous precedents to their astrophysical disciplines and practice.⁹

This codification of boundaries between the planetary and the cosmic–boundaries articulated with recourse to atmosphere and wind–is a peculiarity of so-called Western contexts: it has few analogues in many Indigenous spacetime cosmologies and frameworks. Borderlines inform most every facet of modern astrophysical science, including, at the methodological and practical levels, the conception of atmosphere as a barrier separating planetary from extraplanetary subjects, a separation that has a direct role to play in the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope atop Mauna Kea, and at the epistemological and ontological levels, according to Mi’kmaw astronomer Hilding Neilson, the tendency of "Western Sciences... to be fragmented and separated into isolated disciplines” while "Indigenous knowledges tend to be (W)holistic and boundless."¹⁰ Critique of disciplinary, conceptual, and planetary boundary-drawing emphasizes the ways in which relationships and participation with the natural world were and still are key elements in Indigenous cosmological knowledge and practice.

In compiling this selection of astrophotographs, I was guided by Māori astronomical frameworks. According to legend, at the beginning of the world, the Earth Mother, Papatūānuku, and the Sky Father, Ranginui, held each other in a tight embrace; their children, the atua (gods) of the Māori pantheon, enfolded in the eternal darkness between their parents, conspired to separate Rangi and Papa and allow light into the world. The god of forests, Tāne Mahuta, lay on his back and used his legs to lever Rangi and Papa apart, eventually propping the Sky Father above the Earth Mother using the great trees of his forests.

The sole detractor among the group of gods was Tāwhirimātea, the atua of wind and weather. Enraged and aggrieved by the separation of the Earth and the Sky, Tāwhiri attacked Tāne and his brothers and was only defeated by the warrior god Tūmatauenga, who banished Tāwhiri to the sky to join his father Rangi: "Defeated and overcome with sorrow, Tāwhirimātea plucked his eyes and cast them into the heavens in a display of rage and contempt towards his siblings and aroha (love) for his father. These eyes became the stars of Matariki [the Pleiades], Ngā mata o te ariki Tāwhirimātea." ¹¹

Māori cosmologies, particularly Māori astronomical knowledge organized in reference to Matariki and the Maramataka, or the Māori lunar calendar, completely inverts the relational and symbolic economies codified by Western astrophysical sciences and astronomical practices. While an observatory director's mission to construct massive telescopes on the tops of sacred mountains and an astrophotographer's pining for unobstructed skies on windy nights together cast the planet, the wind, and astronomical objects as individuated subjects insurmountably separated from each other, and consequently in conflict, the figure of Tāwhiri bridges the space between bodies terrestrial and celestial.

Moreover, Tāwhiri's banishment to the night sky and the transmutation of his eyes into the stars of the cluster Matariki suggests that the wind is, itself, a cosmological entity, a mediating manifold suffusing inner and outer space. Indeed, like Tāwhiri's starlight eyes, wind has long been recognized as an astronomical phenomena, particularly in relation to our sun, whose coronal mass ejections hurl plasma and radiation into interplanetary space and register at a planet's poles as aurorae. 'At what point the outermost layer of the atmosphere, the exosphere, becomes 'outer space' is a matter still contended;" to invoke the planetary, writes anthropologist Lisa Messeri, is to reckon with the boundary-edge between the Earth and the cosmos figured less as a consistently and concisely demarcated line and more as a diffusion gradient, bleeding weather and wind into starlight.¹²

Perhaps the cosmos percolates into the planet, or the planet percolates into the cosmos; perhaps both; perhaps the divergence between the two is nonsensical given the way the atmosphere dissipates at its ill-imagined edges like fog lingering after a bitter winter. Perhaps, like Tāwhiri, astrophotographers might well benefit from recognizing the wind's cosmic extensions, drawing from Indigenous studies of planet, place, and cosmology to engage critically with and critique the hegemonic relations between inner and outer space upon which settler colonial violence depends.