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Look to the skies for our future
By The Chronicle-Journal
Wednesday, March 19, 2008

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The story of the David Dunlap Observatory is indeed an exciting one that rivals the story of the race to the moon of the 1960s.
After the First World War, an enterprising and determined physics professor named Clarence Chant approached a mining magnate (Dunlap) about installing a huge telescope a short drive north of Toronto – before farms in the vicinity of the provincial capital became over-run by subdivisions and, yes, street lights.
After many fits , starts and disappointments, the observatory was finally opened in 1935, becoming home to what was then the second-largest telescope in the world.
It was truly a stunning facility, located in what was at the time considered the sticks, the middle of nowhere.
By then Chant was no longer a young man. He was 70 years old. But he had believed in his dream and, amazingly, it had come true.
Though the Dunlap Observatory helped put Hogtown on the map and became renowned the world over for important astronomical discoveries, its effectiveness had by the 1960s started to dim due to what astronomers call “light pollution” – the urban night-time glare that gets in the way of a clear view to the heavens.
Last fall, the University of Toronto put the Dunlap up for sale.
Children growing up in the GTA these days would be hard-pressed to spot a shooting star or point out the location of Venus or other highly-visible planets.
Not so in Thunder Bay and other Northwestern Ontario locales, where one doesn‘t have to be an amateur astronomer to point out Mars, or Saturn‘s rings, when peering up into an evening Northern sky.
Even if Thunder Bay manages to hold its own economically over the coming decades, urban sprawl and light pollution probably won‘t be something the city will ever have to worry about. It‘s a city that has a lot of potential, but also one that will need all the help it can get as it struggles to diversify its economy and its public institutions.
Some would probably consider a Northern observatory as wildly unattainable (just like the naysayers of Chant‘s era), but we have a clear advantage over other more prosperous jurisdictions: when the sun goes down, it still gets dark.
Chant was a scientist and Dunlap a businessman; but the two men shared a vision that few others in their time thought was worth the trouble. Yet they left an indelible mark, and their town and country benefited enormously.

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