It's a spare room connected to the observatories on Mauna Kea by fiber-optics, and no more impressive than a college computer lab. Had the dome been opened and Basri been at work, he would not have been looking at the sky in old Galilean fashion. The age of looking through a telescope's eyepiece is over. Astronomers don't even need to be on the mountain to look at the sky. But proximity to Mauna Kea is still favored, even though the competition for observation time is fierce.
Astronomy is a cultural activity.
It's a little like art in a sense that it does not produce economic results, but we'd be much the poorer without it. It also satisfies a basic curiosity. They are the gentlest of high mountains, beckoning the climb and the lookout beyond to that observable infinity even as the crunchiness of the fresh rock below reminds you of their infinitesimal, and so finite, age. I spent the following day crunching my way around Kilauea, which has erupted continuously since 1983, adding its own contributions to the universe. In the last 17 years it has spewed enough lava to bury Manhattan under 121 feet of rock, making 547 acres of new land for the Big Island.