Where the earth meets the sky

For half a century, the US land artist Charles Ross has been building this ‘granite pyramid’ in a remote stretch of desert in New Mexico. The structure’s decades in the making, however, are just a blink in the timescale it aims to capture. The unique observatory puts 26,000 years of celestial movement perspective, allowing viewers to visualise Polaris – our steady ‘North Star’ throughout human history – becoming unfixed in the night sky.

In Where the Earth Meets the Sky, the filmmaker Rafael Salazar Moreno captures this project on the precipice of completion, with Ross – who started sketching Star Axis in 1971, in his early 30s – now in his late 80s. Bridging timescales of its own, the short documentary includes archival footage from the late filmmaker Wendy Apple, who died in 2017 and never saw Ross’s sprawling vision, or her own film chronicling it, completed. With his treatment, Moreno builds something remarkable in its own right: the film grapples with grand, overlapping questions about the meaning of art and our connection to the Universe in just 24 minutes.

Websites: National Gallery of Art, Rava Films How humble Quaker origins inspire James Turrell’s otherworldly light art Embark on an operatic, interactive journey to a witness the birth of a star Prelude to the space age – the 1960 film that inspired ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ Revisiting ‘Powers of Ten’ – what we’ve learned about the Universe since 1977 The classic 1977 film that put the vastness of the universe into perspective Visualisations explore what the deep future holds for our night sky Transforming landscape painting into a portal through time Burning ice, metal clouds, gemstone rain – tour the strangest known exoplanets The majestic Earth as seen through the eyes of astronauts orbiting above