But even exhaustion doesn't keep me from getting up at 3 a.m. for yet another astounding view: the swirling Northern Lights, like ocean bioluminescence in the sky.
Yet taken together it forms a fascinating survey of the ways different artists have responded to the same set of givens: the land, the ocean, the dome of sky above and the uniquely glimmering light.
The first Polynesian voyagers used indigenous scientific astronomical knowledge, harnessing the night sky and the environment to guide them across 162 million square kilometres of ocean.
We were into open country now, running straight up the coast about a mile from the ocean on a two-lane blacktop road across the dunes with no clouds in the sky and a full moon blazing down on the Pacific.
Metop's suite of instruments retrieve a range of data - from the temperature and water content of the different layers in the atmosphere to the speed of the winds whipping across the ocean, and from the health of the ozone layer to the spread of volcanic ash plumes across the sky.
If Iraq were to fall out of the sky onto a random part of the earth, odds are good that it would plunk into the ocean, sink for at least two miles and then settle into a seemingly endless mudflat called the abyssal plain.