A cold wind blew across the caldera, and we lay down to view the sky, the clouds streaking overhead as the heavens vaulted.
FOR many people Chicago is the quintessential American city, an extraordinary artefact in the middle of the heartland, where tall buildings reach for the heavens, overhead railways rattle above the sidewalks, politicians rule by machine and immigrants are fashioned into citizens of the world's first new nation.
Under such dark skies, the Milky Way can be seen stretching from horizon to horizon in an arc overhead, and the heavens are studded with thousands of stars and many nebulae, including the dramatic Magellanic clouds not visible from far northern latitudes.
At the South Pole--atop an ice pack two miles thick, where it is drier than the Sahara and colder than parts of Mars--astronomers like Nguyen this week are getting what may be the clearest view on Earth as Jupiter and a comet clash in the heavens overhead.
The ceiling seems to open overhead onto a heaven that Rubens might have imagined.
Once I had got to know Ioanikios, he came over to me a few times during a break in the singing to ask how I was doing or tell me what was happening ("This is the dance of the angels," he said, as the golden candelabra swang back and forth overhead. "All of heaven is dancing").
I can understand why it's not everybody's theatrical cup of tea; there are helicopters buzzing overhead, and sometimes the heavens open, soaking the groundlings - but it exemplifies for me what Peter Brook meant by "the rough theatre" in his 1968 book The Empty Space.
The glass roof overhead slid back, exposing the heavens.
Like a child lying on her back watching the heavens slide by overhead, the telescope will hold a position that allows stars and galaxies to drift across its camera, creating pictures in a long, continuous strip.
Never mind that those writers lived in cultures that thought the Earth was flat and the heavens were a solid dome overhead.
The Supreme Court was asked to decide whether the drilling had taken place at a depth that, like aeroplanes soaring overhead, could be exempted from the old heaven-and-hell maxim.
