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Hawaii's Big Island just may be the best place in the world to admire the night sky. Here, our lovers' guide to gazing at the heavens.

I’m sitting on the bed, packing for our trip to Hawai’i, when my husband, Paul, comes into our bedroom. He watches me fold my long underwear and place it into the suitcase—and looks poised to check my forehead for a fever.

But what I’m doing isn’t as crazy as it seems. We’re headed to the Big Island to go stargazing, and, while his and hers thongs may be standard for sunbathing, warm clothes come in handy when traveling to the cold summit of a slumbering volcano for a view of the heavens.

Multicolored beaches, lush waterfalls and Kilauea, the most active volcano on the planet, already make the Big Island a dreamy destination for sun-loving honeymooners. But what most visitors don’t know is that scientists consider it to be the best place in the world for stargazing.

There, the summit of 13,796-foot-tall Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano, offers a magnificently clear window to the universe. You can see a whopping 90 percent of the stars visible from Earth, thanks to the island’s location—2,500 miles from the nearest continent—and a pollution-free, exceptionally dark sky. Soon, my husband and I will hop a plane bound for Hawai’i, ready to play peek-a-boo with the solar system—and we couldn’t be more excited about our trip.

Sky Walkers

When we arrive on the island and check into the Hapuna Beach Prince Hotel, we find that the resort offers a sky-watching excursion at its sister property, the swank Mauna Kea Beach Hotel, so we sign up for a group tour scheduled for that night. During the day, Paul and I hike in nearby Waipio Valley, a pristine sliver of rain forest whose lush taro patches and cascading waterfalls are surrounded by 2,000-foot-high cliffs.

Shortly after dusk, we join 10 other guests at the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel’s seaside tennis courts, where our incredibly knowledgeable guide, Wayne M. Fukunaga, greets us. He’s brought with him a hefty 11-inch-diameter telescope that resembles a missile launcher from an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. For the next few minutes, my fellow voyeurs and I gaze in wonder at 13-billion-year-old star clusters, which were born when the Milky Way Galaxy was first formed. Then, Wayne swings the telescope around to show us M57, the remnants of a star that imploded 20,000 years ago. It looks a bit like a cosmic bellybutton—or a lone tortellini in the sky. A video system attached to his telescope magnifies these celestial objects to the size of silver dollars. At the end of an hour, I have traveled by sight to places where no man has physically gone before—and it has got to be the easiest journey I’ve ever taken.

Drawn to the Light

In the morning, I realize that our brief look at the stars the night before has left me wanting more. There’s only one place to go: up, to the top of Mauna Kea, the center of the island’s astronomical activity. Since 1968, when the first of 13 telescopes was erected atop Mauna Kea, astronomers have traveled here to study Pluto’s surface ice, watch a volcano erupt on one of Jupiter’s moons and witness the birth of new solar systems. The instruments assembled on this Hawaiian mountaintop represent the largest collection of international observatories in the world.

Fortunately, what’s available to the world’s leading astronomers is also accessible to mere mortals like us. Rental-car agencies do not allow their vehicles on the rough road to the summit, so we book an eight-hour stargazing trip with Hawai’i Forest and Trail, one of several licensed tour operators.

The tour doesn’t start until the afternoon, so we spend the morning

visiting a Kona coffee farm (one of the island’s most famous exports) and the art galleries of funky Holualoa, a slip of a town located in the mountains, just south of our hotel. Then, it’s back to the hotel’s beach for snorkeling hand in hand among rainbow-colored fish. As morning turns into afternoon, I return to our room to change out of my bikini and sandals and into the layered clothing and sneakers that the tour operator suggested. Suddenly, I wonder why my husband and I are giving up spending the rest of the day in paradise to shiver on the top of a mountain. But I’m hooked on the feeling of seeing the world from a new perspective, and so I stash my long underwear, gloves and turtleneck in a shoulder bag—and out the door we go.

Up the Hill

The four-wheel-drive van picks us up in front of the hotel, then cuts inland across the island through lava fields as brittle as the residue at the bottom of our barbecue back at home. Gradually, we ascend to the parched, grassy plains that bisect the privately owned 210,000-acre Parker Ranch, which sprawls across the side of the mountain. Our guide, Lisa Nelson, a Colorado-born redhead who holds a degree in natural sciences from the University of Hawai’i, regales us with scientific and historical information about the island, as well as folklore, as the van ambles toward the crest.

Tonight’s journey, she explains, will take us through five climate zones, including hot desert and polar tundra. Our destination is the summit of the 4,000-year-old Mauna Kea, which, according to ancient Hawaiian legend, is inhabited by Poliahu, the Hawaiian goddess of snow and ice, sister to the better-known deity Pele, who is said to live within the Big Island’s active volcano, Mount Kilauea.

The road is riddled with potholes, and I’m grateful when, after about an hour and a half, we stop at the base of Mauna Kea for a picnic dinner of macadamia nut-crusted fish and chicken breasts stuffed with artichokes and spinach. I’m happy to dig into the meal, but I know the real reason for our hour-long stop is so that we can acclimate to the increasing elevation and avoid getting nauseated or headachy.

I slip on my long underwear and turtleneck during a lull in the meal, so I’m ready when Lisa distributes hooded Arctic-weather parkas. As she hands me mine, she warns us all that the average nighttime temperature atop Mauna Kea often dips below freezing.

Last year, the summit had six-foot-high snowdrifts from December through May—but we’ve lucked out with unusually warm weather, and there’s no snow on the ground today. Piling back into the van, we continue our switchback climb up the slopes of Mauna Kea through an increasingly lunar-like landscape marked by otherwordly silversword plants, whose spiky blooms appear only once every 43 years. Shortly after we pass the cratered volcanic dust bowl where astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Mike Collins test-drove their lunar rovers, the weather turns damp and misty. When we emerge from the fog, I realize that we have literally traveled above the clouds.

Somewhere around 10,000 feet above sea level, Lisa recites a list of oxygen deprivation-related effects we may experience during our nearly 14,000-foot ascent. Move slowly, she warns. Suddenly, lying on the beach starts sounding better than ever. I feel okay, but my speech sounds inordinately thick and slow, as though I’ve had a few drinks too many.

We pile out of the van, and we are reminded that visitors are not allowed inside any of the observatories. No matter: I am content to wander this otherwise barren wasteland and snap pictures of my surreal surroundings. Mauna Kea’s striking “Gemini Northern Telescope,” a seven-nation joint venture, sits inside a structure that resembles a giant space helmet. Huddled on a slightly lower plateau, near the horizon, a surprisingly small pair of white observatories house two of the world’s most powerful telescopes. I walk up to one of these dome-like buildings and touch its square metal base. Suddenly, the other observatory rotates on its axis and, as I watch the massive structure move, I feel like I’m caught in a strange science fiction movie.

Waiting for the sunset to begin, I am reminded of Mount Haleakala, a better-known volcano on the Hawaiian island of Maui, where watching the sunrise practically constitutes a rite of passage. According to Lisa, about 40 percent of the sunrises on Haleakala are clouded out. Mauna Kea’s skies, on the other hand, are clear an average of 325 days a year, so seeing a spectacular sunset from there is practically guaranteed.

Whether it is the perfection of the moment or lack of oxygen, I suddenly feel overwhelmed by the uncontrollable giddiness that Lisa warned us about, and I gain a fleeting appreciation for what is meant by a “natural high.” Standing so far above the earth, I feel eerily serene. I now understand why ancient Hawaiians believed Mauna Kea to be the dwelling place of the Creator. Slipping behind me, Paul places his freezing-cold fingers inside my toasty mittens. (Now, he’s glad that I brought them.) Hands linked, he pulls me closer and we silently watch a majestic river of indigo, purple, pink and yellow spread slowly across the sky. Though dusk has barely begun, I am already starry-eyed at the notion of being on top of the world with the man I love.