Astronomy PhD candidate takes up residence in provincial park

Veronika Dornan followed up the April 8^th total solar eclipse with another awe-inspiring celestial moment.

This time the astronomy PhD candidate wasn’t cheering alongside thousands of people at the Ron Joyce Stadium at McMaster – she was alone with a telescope in the heart of Killarney Provincial Park just before midnight. Veronika had the park’s telescope pointed at one of the hundreds of globular star clusters that make up the Milky Way. She was seeing light from thousands of stars that had travelled more than 10,000 years to reach the Earth. This time there was no cheering – all she could say was a quiet “wow”.

Veronika had driven five hours north to spend a week at Killarney Park as the astronomer in residence. The outreach program’s run by the park in collaboration with the Allan I. Carswell Observatory at York University. Veronika applied because the program combines her two favourite things – astronomy and the great outdoors. While she’s a lifelong backcountry camper, hiker and canoeist, she’d never been to Killarney. Bruce Waters, who’s taught astronomy to the public since 1981 and co-founded Stars over Killarney, warned Veronika that once she went to the park she wouldn’t want to go anywhere else. Everywhere she looked was like a painting, something “a certain Group of Seven had already thought many times over.”

She spent her days hiking the Granite Ridge, Crack and Chikanishing trails and kayaking on George Lake.  At night, she went stargazing with campers – or at least tried to. The weather didn’t cooperate most evenings – instead of looking through the park’s two domed telescopes, Veronika improvised and gave talks in the amphitheatre beneath cloudy skies. She’s delivered dozens of talks over the years in the W.J. McCallion Planetarium and out in the community. “It’s a bit more complicated when you’re talking about the stars while at the same time fighting for your life against swarms of bugs.”

When the campers called it a night and the clouds parted, Veronika would spend hours observing the stars. “I seriously messed up my sleep schedule.” She chose not to pitch a tent in the campgrounds and instead opted for an apartment next to the telescopes for a shorter walk to bed.

She also gave astrophotography a try during her residency, capturing images of the Ring Nebula and the Great Hercules Cluster. “People assume astronomers take their own photos. I needed quite a lot of guidance for how to take the images. It took a while to fiddle with the image properties but I got my images.”

Veronika’s been invited back for another week-long residency in bug-free October when longer nights offer more opportunities to explore and photograph the final frontier.

She’s aiming to defend her PhD thesis early next summer and then build a career that continues to combine research and outreach. “Research leads to new discoveries which gives you exciting things to talk about. And if you’re not connecting with the public then what’s the point of doing research?”