‘Occultations I’, Still from video. A commission for Bluedot Festival at Jodrell Bank, with technologist Tom Cowell.
The 5-minute long video was created as an alternative to a typical planetarium film, that narrates across a sky of constellations. This film asks viewers to consider the journey of ancient light in the Universe in the obscuring of a celestial object by another. When looking out for a few minutes into a clear night sky, it’s easy to miss motion when our perception of time and space is shaped primarily by our diurnal bias and everyday practices. The animation is mapped using open source amateur astronomer occultation data. The film is part of an ongoing series of works that explore celestial occultations, in a pattern of cosmic motion that from our perspective is halts light for the briefest of moments from greeting Earth.