When Robert Shults was granted permission to photograph an extremely powerful laser housed in the bowels of the University of Texas in Austin, he started doing his research. Instead of reading about science, however, he studied influential images like Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photos from the Vatican.

That’s because he sees the scientists’ work as “God-like.” They’re using the laser to study things like how stars die and galaxies are formed, and he figured that if he was going to capture the essence of their work, he needed to find the right kind of inspiration.

“There was a real sense of walking into a place of sacredness,” he says. “And it helped that the area where the laser is housed was cathedral-like.”

The images Shults made are indeed ethereal and they’ve struck a chord with a wide audience. He recently funded a Kickstarter project to produce a book called The Superlative Light, which he hopes will publish this fall.

“In my mind, the project is really less about what the place looks like and more about capturing what it feels like to do this science,” he says.

Shults was first granted access back in 2009, and over nine months he shadowed the scientists as they prepped and then started using what’s called the Texas Petawatt Laser. At the time he was shooting, it produced the most powerful laser pulse in the world and a had peak output nearly 2,000 times greater than the entire U.S. electrical grid.

At first, Shults says it was slow going as he tried to figure out how he was going to document such a complicated scene. He had to choose his gear carefully because there wasn’t much room to work. He ended up using a small Leica M6 with a 50mm lens.

“I was so nervous about getting in the scientists’ way and was constantly worried about bumping into something,” he says.

He chose a rangefinder camera because it meant his eye wasn’t looking right through the lens, which would protect him from the light. And a film camera was better than a digital camera because he only risked losing a frame of film, instead of an entire digital chip, if he had accidentally aligned the lens with the beam of the laser.

For film he used Fuji Neopan 1600, which produced high-contrast images and helped him set a particular mood for the shoot. He shot for several weeks without developing the first rolls, which forced him to stick to his approach and not second-guess himself.

“I found it really helpful to be shooting blind for a while,” he says.

There was a lot of downtime over the nine months he was there, so Shults always had two books he was reading; The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality by the Dalai Lama, and The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God by Carl Sagan. Both books deal with the convergence of religion, spirituality and science, and Shults says they helped “keep me in character.”

During the course of the project, Shults says he also drew inspiration from science fiction. He realized that his photos appeared almost supernatural, so he embraced the line between fact and fiction. When his book publishes, it will include an original science fiction story by author and mathematician Rudy Rucker.

It was time to finish when Shults realized he’d finally come to understand parts of the laser. He feared this understanding diminished his awe, and that his photos would suffer as a result. But he also realized that after nine months he’d come full circle. Walking in he says was a religious person, and had used that framework to guide his camera, and now after watching scientists run such powerful experiments, he felt like there was no need for a God.

“I realized the universe has all the materials it needs and there was no need for divine forces,” he says. “It was a very powerful change.”