Many of the brush strokes, conceptual pieces and gorgeous lenses of glowing resin key to the Getty’s as-usual wildly ambitious Pacific Standard Time — this year themed Art & Science Collide — are in the San Gabriel Valley.

Because this is where art and science collide.

The Huntington, Caltech, JPL, Pacific Asia, ArtCenter, the Norton Simon, the Armory — all have major, or at least majorly interesting, exhibits that are among the 74 Southern California participants showcasing work of over 800 artists this fall.

But the intersection of art and science that most transported me out of the shows I’ve seen so far was not technically part of what is now, in its third iteration since 2011, called PST Art — it is coincidental to it, although one of its artists curated another PST exhibit.

And the top of Mount Wilson, in the gloriously steam-punk 100-inch telescope dome, may be more hovering over the San Gabriel Valley than actually in it. The rim of the valley, perhaps. Man, what a view — of the universe, and of all of us.

Sunday — crisp, clear — we drove up the Angeles Crest Highway for the first time in years for the closing party of former ArtCenter VP Stephen Nowlin and Mexican-born artist Rebeca Mendez’s “Of Sea and Sky” show — and, first off, there’s never been a better venue for art.

None of those matte-white walls and neighboring Melrose fine dining options for this art — you had to hike to get to it! And your lungs feel the fact you’re a mile high. Signs warn of bears. And the dome of the Hooker — for decades the world’s biggest telescope, with which Hubble proved the expansion of the universe — looms like a perfect cumulus above you as you approach.

Inside, real astronomers from the Carnegie Institution press buttons and pull levers to roll the dome open and closed, dramatically changing the ambient light, and to spin the catwalk — and whole interior floor — as if you were in the most enticing rotating penthouse restaurant in the world.

The curvature of the walls made it hard to hang flat art on, but Stephen ran the Williamson Gallery at ArtCenter, where he co-curated the current “Seeing the Unseeable: Data, Design, Art” show with Julie Joyce and Christina Valentine — he knows how to hang. The Altadenan’s degrees are in art but he used to work at Caltech, and his own art has long been steeped in imagery from JPL planetary probes of the solar system. His fascination is with the meeting of old and new ponderings about outer space — one piece reproduces a treatise from 1638, “The Discovery of a World in the Moone: Or, a Discourse Tending to Prove that ‘tis probable there may be another habitable World in that Planet.” Another piece uses his own lines from another exhibit that looked skyward: “every day is a night bullied out of darkness by the glare of our nearest star.”

Then, the dome closing, Mendez’s film detailing the migration of the Arctic tern from the Antarctic to the Arctic and back again every year is projected on a huge round screen hung on the dome wall — pure magic, the sound of the birds’ call echoing in the giant room.

That show is closed, but you have a few weeks — check PST.art for schedules — to see other local PST exhibits. “Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis” at the Huntington comes out of a revelatory 19th-century lecture series by John Ruskin in which almost 200 years ago the critic gave his observations “of a disturbing new weather pattern he believed had not previously been described or recorded” — the first time, really, anyone had ever dealt with the fact of smog: the London “pea soup” that was no ordinary fog at all, and that pre-shadowed the effects pollution would have on our world.

Make sure to get to the campus buildings and outside spaces on the east side of Caltech to see “Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920-2020” before Dec. 15 for a revelatory look at both historical and contemporary takes on how the two disciplines interact. The engineers there have for over a century had a soft spot for helping artists with their materials, and Pasadena native Helen Pashgian, the lone woman in the Light and Space movement beginning in the ‘60s, has a new resin-based lens in the Chen building that you must drop everything to see. As the light dims in the room, the disk changes its glow from red-orange to green. Or does it? Is that just the cones and rods in the retina reacting? The answer is in the art, and the science.

Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com