Anyone who has experienced a debilitating sleep disorder knows what it is like to be the walking dead.

Reversing the sleep and wake cycles of the human through night shift work is known to cause extensive long term damage in humans.

Sleep disorders are commonly misdiagnosed as mental health disorders.

I associate night shift work with circadian rhythm disorders, extreme working hours and tumors.

Very high altitude extreme night shift work is a class 2A carcinogen that may result in lifelong disabling sleep disorders, high cholesterol, radiation sickness and heart, lung and brain damage.

One can only wonder what the motivation is for Mauna Kea astronomers to subject their nighttime support staff to extremely long and fatiguing night shifts when they are easily avoidable.

Extreme night shift work in high altitude astronomy is easily avoidable by using a split night shift where the first night shift starts before sunset and finishes at midnight and the second night shift starts with a new fresh person working through to after sunrise.

Darkness enables us to shine.

At the age of 46 I was starting to see the appearance of rainbow halos and starbursts around bright nighttime lights, problems reading small print, focusing issues with my eyes, and image recognition issues. I had been exposed to bright high powered 20 watt scattered sodium LASER light a decade earlier in very high altitude astronomy.