The air has the kind of chill snap in it that one doesn't usually associate with Hawaii. But, it can be quite chilly here. Thousands of feet below, in the core of the Trade Winds blowing from the northeast, my house is usually damp and cool. Imagine, if you will, the problem one might have buying a space heater in Hawaii, where the houses are designed to be wide open and uninsulated. Then, imagine what it might take to buy snow chains in Hawaii, and you have a clue what it's like to work up here. In the winter at least, when layers of snow a few inches to several feet deep cover the summit. At the top, even in summer, the temperature is rarely above freezing deep into a tropical mountain night.

At fourteen thousand feet, the air on the mountain is piercingly thin. The lack of oxygen, dangerous in itself to some people, evovos a strange quality of thinking. The brain moves in fits and starts, screeching to a halt as I forget what it was I was just about to say ("Hm, I knew I had something on my mind"). It is magnificently surreal here.

Work up here moves slowly. With only sixty percent of the oxygen at sea level, our tasks have to be at least forty percent easier. The sheer beauty of the place, though, makes up for the difficulty of being here. Sitting in a bleak control room, I take frequent breaks on an outside catwalk, just to take a deep breath and see the sky.

In any dark place, it takes a while for the eyes to adjust. At this altitude, though, the eyes are starved for oxygen. So, it takes a while. When I step out on the catwalk, I can't see my hand in front of my face. Far below, the lights of Hilo appear amber and attenuated through a layer of clouds carried on those perpetual Trades. Then a few of the brightest stars appear. A couple of the planets, too: red Mars and yellowish Jupiter. In a few minutes some fainter points of light, and the cloudy expanse of the Milky Way, stretching from horizon to horizon.

There are few places left on the planet where such a magnificent view can be had. The spread of development has meant the spread of city lights, sprawling across the landscape and illuminating the sky. Here, isolated in the Pacific, there is little to break the serene beauty of the celestial dome. I walk around the building, my eyes adjusting further. Now, I see the lights of Waimea, and faint sky glow from Maui and even Honolulu, over two hundred miles away.

Overhead, the stars brighten and the view deepens. Standing on a street corner in San Francisco, I might see half a dozen stars between the buildings, they look like dots shining in a dome, like the little lighted stars in the vault of Grand Central Station. Here, though, now that my eyes have adjusted, I can see the Via Lacta and its glowing grayish patterns of light and dark. Maybe because I know this, but maybe because I'm observing it, I can see that there are dark clouds floating in front of the more distant stars. In one of those magical moments in which one's vision slightly alters, changes perspective through some unknown mechanism as if grasping something long lost, I can suddenly see the shape and depth of what soars across the sky. We are on a sphere embedded within a massive disk. From within, it looks like a wheel seen edge-on. Dark clouds drift among the countless stars and obscure the view. We can't see the center of our own galaxy, but here, tonight, I can at least point to its general direction.

It is almost ridiculous to presume that I am seeing much of the universe at all, with my unaided and oxygen-starved eye. Fortunately, my work doesn't depend on this view, as spectacular and as moving as it is. I return within the building. One floor above, inside its steel dome, our telescope steers itself, following the sky with a grace peculiar for something weighing four hundred tons. Even with the largest such camera in the world, our point of view is barely the size of the full moon on the sky. With fancy computer techniques and a surprising amount of guesswork, we produce the amazing photographs you see in the papers and magazines. These are enhanced, though. They don't show quite what those places would look like if you could somehow stand there. With your own eyes, these exotic and impossibly distant corners of the galaxy would look very much like what we see standing out on a high mountaintop, eyes adjusting to the sharp darkness.

Alan Bean is a man who walked on the moon. He was a pilot and an engineer. Today, he is an artist, and he paints his memories of an unreal adventure upon that shining sphere in the sky. Among artists who paint images of the universe, he is perhaps the best. And yet none have captured that feeling of standing beneath the arc of the Milky Way. The sky is always too black. The stars or the foreground are always too bright. The surfaces of planets near giant red stars are never as full of glare as our own. Most particularly, the colors and swirls of clouds are depicted with too-saturated colors, too bright, lacking the subtlety of imagination required to see what is up there in the first place.

After a few weeks of working on the mountain, I was asked if the place had inspired me to paint. I had considered it, pondering even the strange exercise of painting in the dark, in the middle of the night on the top of Mauna Kea. The more I stood there, though, beneath that sky, the more I knew it would be a pointless attempt. This is not the kind of unreal beauty that can be captured in paint and canvas. Looking up there, I can imagine the stark beauty of the sky. I even make a profession of capturing it in massive electronic images. Yet this is a form of imagination somehow divorced from the creative urge to paint. Friends of mine wondered, but it made sense to me. The sky is ungraspable. I can see how it inspires mystical feeling. Nothing but the most evocative abstract imagery can capture its stir.

This submission has been viewed 4496 times.