Seán Cubitt’s talk on Nov 17 2025, 6 pm examines some histories of relations with the night sky as a way of thinking through histories of aesthetics and politics. Aesthetics is thinking about art, about beauty, and the senses. Art may be a purely human activity, but beauty extends to the loveliness of the starry night. Senses cannot be restricted to the narrow range of the five senses because daily, monthly and annual cycles sweep through everything on the face of our planet, conscious and non-conscious, extending towards sensations we are barely aware of like ultra-violet radiation and lunar gravity. Before the domestication of fire, quite possibly before language, the night sky enthralled and overwhelmed ancestors, drove them underground, and framed their first forays into art. This paper imagines star-gazing as cultural motif and political management. Once the meeting place of humans, gods and ancestors, the night sky became by turns a constellation of objects for religious, instrumental and scientific instruction. A more-than-human aesthetic politics begins in awe, considers objectivity and subjectivity and, drawing on indigenous wisdom, begins the task of healing the rifts between humans, ancestors and ecologies.