I was sitting on pavement, in the pitch black, staring at black, white, silver, yellow, the occasional pale red, and realized: night is underrated.

Not skylines, though. World-class skylines like Hong Kong Central viewed from Kowloon, Manhattan from the south, Pudong from Shanghai’s Bund, Chicago’s Loop: all are better at night, but everybody knows they’re better at night. With clouds and mountains made invisible, these creations of man stand preeminent after dusk. Beautiful, yes, but the most beautiful?

No, you must look up, up to Khayyam’s “inverted bowl”, to see why night is underrated, and the shame is that, for nearly everyone in the modern world, this underrated night remains invisible.

Do you know the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore? He has a poem, often translated as “Lost Star”, which begins with Gods admiring the canvas of stars just after creation. One of the Gods soon notices that a single star, the very jewel of the heavens, bind of its beauty, has disappeared. From that day forward, the Gods can never be satisfied with a just less than perfect sky.

The poem ends by claiming that becoming depressed over near-perfection is the definition of vanity, so I’m afraid the rest of the essay is a direct contradiction of Tagore’s point. Because the sky is pretty good everywhere, isn’t it? Even in the middle of the Bright Lights, Big City, Mars is still red, the North Star still guides, Orion maintains his belt, the Moon is the Moon.

But those voids, that black emptiness! Should not, the skygazer wonders, the sky have filled itself in more properly?

And indeed, the sky has filled itself in properly, if only you go to the right place.

Ayers Rock – Uluru is “what we call it now” - is what it claims to be, a giant piece of sandstone, covered with strange indentations, shifting through the palette, pink, red, orange, brown, as the sun ambles overhead. It seems reasonable to expect that, where there is one giant sandstone rock, there should be other smaller sandstone rocks – mountains come in ranges, rivers have backwaters, cities have suburbs. But Ayers Rock stands lonesome on a vast plain. Thirty miles west is similar formation, the Olgas, but otherwise the landscape is flat red sand dotted with spinifex grass, shrub-like gum trees and spiny mulga, nothing more.

And the skywatcher lucks out, because this landscape is so barren, so inhospitable, that the nearest town of any size is three hundred miles away. No streetlights, no effulgent televisions and cars and convenience stores compete with the stars.

And what a sky it is. It’s not moon plus the odd planet plus a spattering of stars. There are so many stars that their field takes on depth, larger closer stars appearing enormous, distant stars hazy, very distant stars merely giving the faintest discoloration, not more than a suggestion, of white to their corner of the sky. Pinpoint satellites masquerade as stars until their parabolic movement presents evidence of their nature. Did you even realize that you can see satellites? They are everywhere, unmissable, in a truly dark sky.

The structure of the galaxy itself is also impossible to miss. A great silver arc flows from horizon to horizon – the Milky Way! - proving our solar system’s location in the galaxy’s spiral arm. The random location of bright stars seen from an urban viewpoint is utterly misleading; the stars look to be all around us because light pollution hides all but the closest stars! The vast majority of stars lie in the center of the galaxy, forming the band the Chinese call a “silver river”. This arc is a true wonder of the world, and what a great loss it is that most of us now need to fly to barren deserts to see her beauty.

The power ascribed to constellations by our ancient ancestors is made easier to understand by a proper night sky. Since a truly dark sky has depth, the shapes of the constellations are so evident that they need no explaining. After being told to look for a constellation only visible in the Southern Hemisphere called the Southern Cross, a ten second search was sufficient to find it with no further explanation. These constellation appear, mechanically, every night in the same place, without the massive seasonal variation of our earthbound environment. Is it any wonder that such faith was put in the power of meteors, or red moons, or eclipses? Is it any wonder that so many societies believed the stars themselves were Gods? Is not a God inherently immutable, mechanical, perfect, light shining where darkness stands?

Is a beautiful sky not best viewed when the viewer is alone, in darkness, miles from anyone else?

But night is underrated. From the thousands of tourists who bussed by me in daylight to take snapshots of Ayers Rock, not one was near me – lying down, looking up - on the area’s only road three hours after sunset, an hour’s walk south from the hotel complex. Each morning, when I asked other guests whether they took in the Milky Way, or went satellite hunting, or appreciated – I hate using the word, but it’s the only proper choice here – the magnitude of the heavens, the most common reply was that they’d turned in early, that the itinerary called for an early start the next day, that, after all, wasn’t there a site of world interest which we’d flown so far to see? There was such a sight, but you needed to look up to find it. And so I was left alone. I greatly preferred it that way.