86 August 2014 sky & telescopeFocal Point Peter McMahon
Canada’s Dark-Sky Preserves
The large nation has become a choice destination for amateur astronomy.
Grasslands National Park, on the Montana
border. Here, vast plains of green above
fossil-strewn badlands form a natural
baffl ing eff ect, where even light from far
away seems absorbed and intricate galactic
details resolve right down to the horizon.
Visitors frequently report sightings of air-
glow, which is visible only in the darkest
places on Earth.
More than 2 million people a year fl ock
to Jasper National Park in the Alberta
Rockies. This is one of the few national
parks in the world that off ers stargazing
packages, where one can take a ride on a
stargazing bus that may include evening
tours to some of the park’s most iconic
canyons, glaciers, and waterfalls.
Wood Buff alo National Park on the
Alberta/Northwest Territories border is
the largest dark-sky preserve on Earth,
able to fi t Switzerland (or Saturn’s moon
Mimas) along its longest dimension.
A mecca for aurora viewing, the park
recently purchased a 35-person portable
planetarium to simulate starry skies on
cloudy nights or during the day.
Spanning the diameter of Mars, Can-
ada is literally an observing destination
the size of a world, harboring nearly half
of Earth’s designated astronomy parks.
Although a dark-sky pub-crawl of all these
locales may require more than one visit,
perhaps that fact might be just the excuse
you need to take in this observing dream
destination again and again. ✦Peter McMahon has reported on dark-sky
parks for magazines and currently writes
the “Wilderness Astronomer” column in
SkyNews: The Canadian Magazine of
Astronomy & Stargazing, where he is a
contributing editor. For more on these parks,
visit WildernessAstronomy.com.When you t hink of dream locations for
observing, your thoughts probably turn to
Chile’s Atacama Desert or the Australian
Outback. But thanks to strenuous eff orts
to control light pollution, many parts of
Canada should now be on this list.
Sure, the country doesn’t have as many
clear nights as these other places, but it
has developed the world’s largest network
of astronomy parks. Over the past 15 years,
Canada has quietly set aside 80,000 square
kilometers of parkland — almost 1% of
the land area of the world’s second largest
nation — in the form of 19 dark-sky pre-
serves. In these sky-gazing havens, local
ordinances defend the night against urban
light pollution.
Such locales are approved by the Royal
Astronomical Society of Canada, which
grants dark-sky designations to parks after
a process that requires applicants to dem-
onstrate lighting control, local support,
and the ability to provide public astronomy
interpretation.
Some of these astronomy parks are
based in previously established nationalparks, such as New Brunswick’s Fundy
National Park and Nova Scotia’s Kejim-
kujik National Park. The latter boasts
some of the darkest skies in the maritime
provinces and an aboriginal Sky Circle
amphitheater that local star seekers call
their “outdoor planetarium.”
Another dark-sky preserve is centered
on Québec’s Mont Mégantic. During the
day you can see Maine and New Hamp-
shire from the 1,102-meter (3,615-foot)
summit. At night, the most powerful
telescope on the Eastern seaboard — a 1.6-
meter Ritchey-Chrétien telescope in nearly
pristine darkness — scans the skies for a
team of international researchers. A few
dozen meters down the mountain, park
staff ers take requests at the controls of a
24-inch public telescope.
The dark-sky parks of Ontario span
from Canada’s southern tip to the ship-
wrecks of Lake Huron, where naturalists
guide ferry passengers through the heav-
ens with image-stabilized binoculars.
But the hands-down darkest stargazing
experience in Canada is in Saskatchewan’sJasper Dark-Sky PreserveYUICHI TAKASAKA / WWW.BLUE-MOON.CA