Science & Tech
As smoke veils our skies, what happens to our connection with the cosmos?
In 2023, wildfire smoke choked the skies of Jasper National Park.
During the day, we rarely saw the sun. All we could see, taste and smell was ash. This was a place in which I had helped create one of the largest dark sky preserves in the world, and ran a stargazing business to share the cosmos with locals and visitors alike. Now, at night, our optical telescopes could still make out objects in the solar system, but deep space was almost invisible.
The smoke in Canada was apocalyptic, the worst wildfire season on record so far. Then, this past July, I watched helplessly as wildfires devoured nearly a third of the town of Jasper.
The disastrous convergence of three different fires created a possible fire tornado. Flames, 100 metres tall, launched charred pine cones and embers ahead of the blaze, with parts of the fire generating lightning strikes and downdrafts strong enough to toss a 6-metre long sea-can weighing more than 3000 kilograms more than a hundred meters into the Athabasca River, as the inferno scorched 39,000 hectares of the park.
“Arriving back at our observatory for the first time since the fire, it was like a freight train went through and took out all the buildings in its path,” says Scott Eady, my fellow Jasper Planetarium director. “Everything smelled like smoke but we just stayed focused on getting the projector and telescopes up and running again — if for no other reason, to take our focus off the tragedy.”
The smoke left our telescopes and equipment marred, and for a time it blocked the very skies this equipment served to observe.
When residents were allowed back into the town, they turned to the skies for comfort. “What happened in Jasper turned people’s worlds upside down,” Eady says. “But when the sun set and the stars came out, they could look up at the skies and see something familiar. It was calming.” That calm, though, continued to be punctuated with smoke from continuing wildfires in Western Canada and then California.
Jasper National Park was designated a dark sky preserve in 2011 by the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. Dark sky preserves defend the night against light pollution and people come from around the world to connect with the cosmos in the park. But wildfire smoke is snuffing out the magic of the stars.
During the 2022 wildfire season, I stood at a stargazing event at the top of the Jasper SkyTram, looking down the valley as smoke snaked along the shores of Jasper Lake, 24 kilometers away. That blaze never reached the town, but smoke from the fire ruined views of the heavens at the planetarium and our telescope locations throughout the park for several weeks. It was a far cry from a previous breathtakingly clear night at the SkyTram when a woman from China cried tears of delight at seeing the Milky Way. Her husband explained that, because of air pollution, she had been born too late to see the stars in their home country.
Last year’s catastrophic fire season is a vicious reminder that wildfires are endangering our ability, not just to see, but to study the night sky.
Flames have destroyed several major telescopes at Australia’s Mount Stromlo Observatory and covered optics at California’s Sierra Remote Observatories in ash and debris. A lightning strike in June 2022 sent fire racing up to Kitt Peak National Observatory, where I’m currently based, destroying four buildings and threatening the mountain’s 22 major observatory telescopes, one of which researchers are using to create the largest, most detailed 3D map of the universe ever. This January’s devastating Los Angeles wildfires swept up Mount Wilson, causing the evacuation of that peak’s observatory domes.
Often situated in remote areas where astronomers can observe the skies without light pollution, observatories are vulnerable to fire. Access to emergency services is limited and the forests and grasslands surrounding them can serve as a tinderbox.
Experts are concerned that wildfire smoke could soon usurp light pollution as the most pervasive threat to night sky observing.
Meteorologist and amateur astronomer Allan Rahill created the Clear Sky Chart — a weather forecast system for astronomers that he has since adapted to include the impact of smoke on night sky viewing. Now he visits astronomy clubs, speaking about the effect of forest fires on observational astronomy.
Rahill says there’s enough smoke in the sky from April to October (astronomy season) to impact astronomy on 60 per cent of clear nights. “At the beginning of the century, the wildfire season was mainly from April to July and now it starts by the end of February/early March and ends in late December,” he wrote me recently.
On the day we spoke in July 2023, he checked his live forecast and told me 90 per cent of North America was under smoke.
“I have a 28 inch [diameter] scope,” he says. “In 10 years, there will be no more buyers for it — astronomy will be dead,” he laments.
Yet, there’s hope for those willing to try and adapt.
In Los Angeles, Mount Wilson was spared in-part by proactive brush clearance by engineers and firefighters. Kitt Peak is installing a number of lightning detectors to provide early warnings for strikes on the mountain.
At The Jasper Planetarium, we’ve added a radio telescope capable of peering through the smoke, offering live radio maps of distant galaxies. It makes visual maps of the shape of objects in deep space that look like a thermographic picture of that stellar object. People think it’s kind of nifty, but it’s not what they came to see.
Bob McDonald, host of CBC Radio’s Quirks and Quarks, views smoke-filled skies as a call to action. “Telescopes have always struggled with air turbulence, pollution and clouds. Now smoke is providing such an obstacle to the stars, astronomers will soon have to start dusting off the mirrors,” he says.
“The smoke is a clear signal that it’s time to get on with it and clear our skies.”
I pick up the phone for an after-hours call with Scott. (The planetarium has since reopened but we’re talking constantly with adjusters — insurance claim estimates for wildfire-related damages in the Park recently topped $1.2 billion.) It’s dark in Jasper and there’s a green-and-pink aurora dancing along the northern horizon, Scott tells me, as he sinks down into a partially-melted Muskoka chair.
On Kitt Peak I rest my arm on the charred branch of a dead oak tree where the 2022 wildfire stopped less than 1 metre from a building. I tell Scott the southern Milky Way is just peeking out from the eastern horizon, the stars so bright they look like an airport searchlight shining through holes in a piece of sheet-metal. It’s a reminder of what’s at stake.
“We’ll get there” Scott says. “For sure,” I reply. We’re talking about closing-out insurance claims, but we both know we’re also talking about a future for astronomy in an uncertain climate.
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