What's with Lahaina Noon? Twice a year, when the sun's path lines up directly over this latitude, it climbs to the exact center of the sky and — for a moment at midday — vertical objects cast almost no shadow at all. Hawaiians knew the moment as kau ka lā i ka lolo, "the sun resting on the brains," and today it's called Lahaina Noon. The name fits the town's bright, leeward shore: Lāhainā means "cruel" or "merciless sun," for the dry, sun-soaked western coast of Maui where the light is famously strong.
Native Hawaiians lived on this West Maui shore for centuries, with Lahaina a place of taro loʻi, fishponds, and the royal island of Mokuʻula at Mokuhinia. In the early 1800s Lahaina became the capital of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi — the seat of the islands' royal government in the decades after the 1795 unification — and one of the most important towns in the Pacific.
