A few weeks ago, on the side of Wheeler Peak, I saw the Pillars of Creation — each of them light-years tall — through the lens of a rented camera. Those columns of gas inside the Eagle Nebula are where new stars get built, and they'd been hanging over Nevada the whole time. The same camera caught the Milky Way at a level of detail I'd have sworn came from an observatory and not a guy at a picnic table. It got the Hercules Cluster too — a few hundred thousand suns packed into one ball, faint enough that you only catch it with the naked eye somewhere this dark, never from home.

The first time I saw the Milky Way for real was years ago, at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, my brother standing next to me and the Colorado River rushing past in the dark. The whole dusty arm of it, the first time in my life. I knew it was there. But I'd never stood anywhere dark enough to see it.

And anywhere dark enough is getting hard to find. Something like 80 percent of people in this country can't see the Milky Way from home, the view washed out by a glow that's mostly just light we aimed up at nothing instead of down where we needed it. So you have to drive. 

Great Basin National Park is the better part of five hours from Las Vegas, out where the towns shrink to a gas station and a name, hard against the Utah line. Wheeler Peak Campground is the highest in the entire National Park System, and the elevation of just less than 10,000 feet is part of why the sky's so good. It has some of the darkest skies anyone has measured in the Lower 48.

Turns out the darkest sky I've ever stood under is ours. I'd always figured a sky like the Grand Canyon's was something you drove out of Nevada to find. Utah, maybe. Montana. Somebody else's good fortune. But it's right here, off in a part of the state almost nobody bothers with.

The dark isn't the only thing getting scarce out here. There's a giant radio telescope going up in the Nevada desert right now, put where it is because radio silence has gotten nearly as hard to find as a dark sky.

One night I set the camera tracking on the Milky Way and lay back on the picnic table to wait. A long exposure can run for hours — as long as the clouds cooperate — and there's nothing to do in the meantime but look. So I looked. 

Your eyes take a while to adjust out there. They spend a good half hour getting acquainted with the darkness, and as they do, the black between the bright stars fills with fainter ones, and the space between those fills again, until the sky stops looking like dots on a ceiling and turns crowded and deep. 

A couple of shooting stars went over. The Milky Way sat thick enough overhead to seem like it had weight. The loudest thing on the mountain was the mount under the camera, nudging it a hair at a time to keep the sky centered, like the small mechanical sound you hear at the eye doctor.

As I stared up, I wondered whether anything was looking back. It's the least original thought a person can have out there, and you have it anyway, because the odds are honestly pretty good. All those suns, all those chances. 

But the same distance that makes the odds good makes the answer currently impossible. Anything out there looking back is too far away for the two of us to ever meet in the middle, and I'd be thousands of years dead before a hello crossed the gap. You can only have that thought somewhere dark, though, and we're slowly running out of the dark you need to ask it in.

The camera, meanwhile, had been working the whole time I lay there feeling profound. The picture comes in slowly. The Pillars start as a gray nothing on the screen, then surface frame by stacked frame across the hours, lit from inside. 

You've probably seen them before, on a poster or a screensaver. They might be the most famous thing the Hubble Space Telescope ever shot. This was my own copy, and even though it's not as good, as clear, it's more special because I was there.

The Eagle Nebula sits about 7,000 light years out, something like 41 quadrillion miles. When that light set out, 7,000 years ago, the wheel was cutting-edge human technology. Those photons crossed all that space and time, all 7,000 years' worth, to land this week on a camera I rented in Las Vegas, only to lose the last few minutes of exposure to a cloud. 

You aren't looking at the sky out there. You're looking at the past, just now showing up.

You feel small under it, in a good way. Whatever you hauled up the mountain with you — the unanswered emails, the deadline, the guy who cut you off on the drive in — shrinks. For most of human history, having this feeling cost nothing and you could do it from your own yard. 

Plenty of people would love the luxury today. They're working a second shift instead. They can't see a single star from their window, and not for any lack of looking up.

On our last night, I put the camera away and let my eyes do the work alone, the way they did at the bottom of the Grand Canyon all those years ago, before I understood that dark was something a place could run out of. 

I stayed out until the cold won. There's less of that dark on the map every year, and I mean to get my share while there's still some to get.

Bryan Driscoll is a Las Vegas-based human resources consultant who advises employers on workforce compliance and legal risk.