The log house at LeTerrain under a full field of stars on a winter night, snow on the surrounding spruce and warm light in the windows The same log house at LeTerrain at winter dawn, pink cloud over snow-laden spruce

Dark Sky Preserve

La Pêche, Québec · Est. 2025

The National Capital Region’s first Dark Sky Preserve

LeTerrain is the National Capital Region’s first Dark Sky Preserve, designated by the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada on 30 July 2025 and the closest to Ottawa. Four hundred acres of ridge, forest and wetland an hour north of the city, where the darkness itself is now protected the way the land is.

See the signed designation
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The Milky Way rising between two trees at LeTerrain, with a meteor crossing the upper sky The same clearing at LeTerrain by day, two trees framing an open summer sky

Overhead, on any clear night

The Milky Way from the meadow at LeTerrain. No telescope, no filter, no long exposure tricks the eye could not match. This is what the sky looks like when nothing competes with it.

Stand at the heart of the dark sky

Most of us live under skies that never get dark. City glow washes the night down to a few dozen stars, and the Milky Way has disappeared for a third of humanity. A dark sky preserve draws a line around a place where that has not happened.

Here, you stand at the centre of it. For thirty kilometres in every direction the lighting is shielded to keep this sky whole, for the stargazers, for the owls that hunt by darkness, for the birds that follow the stars south each fall.

Based on the official RASC zone mapping
10 km 20 km 30 km Ladysmith Thorne Otter Lake Danford Lake Kazabazua Shawville Lac-des-Loups Ottawa · 60 km ↘ LeTerrain
Looking up at a cabin from below, its window lit deep red, bare birch branches and a dense field of stars overhead
The Milky Way arching over a farmhouse and a silhouetted treeline at LeTerrain
The Milky Way rising vertically above the shingled gable of an old house, stars filling the sky
The Milky Way between two large trees over the meadow at LeTerrain
The Milky Way rising above a spruce treeline, a vehicle parked in the foreground under a red light
Stars above the gable of a wooden barn, a single red light over the door

Nights on the land

How dark is it here?

Astronomers measure the night sky in magnitudes per square arcsecond: the higher the number, the darker the sky, and every added magnitude is two and a half times darker again. Downtown Ottawa sits near 17.5. A good rural sky reaches about 21, and the natural glow of the atmosphere itself sits near 22. Here, on the stillest nights, the meter reads 22.3, roughly eighty times darker than the city. On the Bortle scale stargazers use, that is a class 1 sky, the darkest class there is.

Measure your own sky with Globe at Night · Light pollution and birds

Downtown Ottawa 17.5 Suburbs about 19.5 Dark rural sky about 21 LeTerrain 22.3 Ottawa 17.5 Suburbs 19.5 Rural sky 21 LeTerrain 22.3

Keep a sky this dark

The preserve stays dark because of the people who protect it. Membership is how you join them: the land, the trails and the night itself, from CA$20 a month. Cancel any time.

Become a member