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A Maori astronomer says there is a huge amount of traditional knowledge about the stars to be collected.
Rangi Mataamua has a Marsden Fund research grant to collect matauranga and develop resources.
His long term vision is to create a Maori astronomy institute, drawing on the whare kokorangi or traditional observatories.
The starting point for his interest was a 400-page manuscript written by his grandfather's grandfather in Ruatuhuna, but he is also interviewing people in other iwi about their star knowledge.
"There are people that still maintain pockets of this information, and people say I don't know very much, but theres just my little bit of knowledge, and when you start adding it together in our moteatea and in our whakatauki, and the marae that have star connections, and the place names it's a massive amount of data. We're starting to try and piece that back together," says Dr Rangi Mataamua
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