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THEBACHA/FORT SMITH
Wood Buffalo National Park is now the largest Dark Sky Preserve in the world.

Visitors utilize a viewing area in Wood Buffalo National Park during the Dark Sky Festival last August. - photo courtesy of Parks Canada

"We're really excited that it's finally come to fruition for us," said Mike Couvrette of the Thebacha and Wood Buffalo Astronomical Society. "We've been working on this for about a year and a half."

The 44,807-square-kilometre Wood Buffalo National Park became the largest Dark Sky Preserve in the world, meaning it is kept free from artificial light pollution, after the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada granted the designation on Aug. 2. The titled was previously held by Jasper National Park.

The designation won't change how the park operates but it can be used to promote astronomy at the park as well as the ecological benefits of an area free from artificial light.

"Hopefully it'll mean more visitorship for the park," said Robert Dick, manager of Canada's Dark Sky Preserve program with the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. "The parks over the past couple of decades have seen decreasing numbers of visitors and they'd really like to increase that. They can promote certain aspects of the (Wood Buffalo National Park), but (wanted) to come up with something a little more unique, something you can't get in southern Canada ... one of those aspects is the quality of the night sky."

In order to obtain the designation, Wood Buffalo National Park needed to meet certain requirements for lighting and public outreach. Since part of the purpose of a Dark Sky Preserve is to create areas where people can visit and use to experience a true night sky, it's not entirely feasible to eliminate all light around park facilities, explained Dick.

As a result, parks with the designation use amber or red lights to keep areas such as parking lots or bathrooms usable without adding extra short wavelength light, or blue light. The lights are on as little as possible.

"When you start putting up artificial lighting that literally fundamentally changes the environment for the wildlife," Dick said.

Areas with artificial light at night, particularly blue light, can skew animals, insects, and plants' conception of the length of day and night. The confusion can be problematic for species like migratory birds which rely on the changing lengths of day and night to tell them when to head to warmer climates for the winter.

"There are lots of nocturnal animals, bats, nighthawks, and animals that need the darkness, that's their time," said Mike Keizer, external relations manager for the southwest NWT field unit of Parks Canada, adding that recent reports have shown camping may help people who have trouble sleeping get their internal clocks back to a natural rhythm.

Festival shares the night

The Wood Buffalo Dark Sky Festival began last year as part of a public outreach requirement for the Dark Sky Preserve recognition.

The festival is coming up on its second year, scheduled from Aug. 23 to 25, and is hosted by the Thebacha and Fort Smith Astronomical Society, which was founded in 2011.

This year's festival activities are scheduled to include a science fair, a camp-out with telescopes for night sky viewing, and an inflatable observatory set up for presentations on the night sky in Fort Smith.

"We're looking forward to working with Parks Canada on developing further outreach programs to share knowledge about our dark sky and hopefully in the future document and record the aboriginal mythology of our Northern skies from the Dene perspective," said Couvrette.

The view of the night sky in a place such as Wood Buffalo Park is something few southern Canadians can appreciate, said Dick and Keizer. Both said the number of stars and the type of activity you can see without any urban lighting nearby can be astounding.

"When you look up and see a night sky like you do in Wood Buffalo, with no light pollution, the Milky Way is an actual Milky Way across the sky and the aurora is breathtaking and you can see more stars than you've ever dreamed." said Keizer. "That's what the benefit of this is."

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