Stake Lake Star Park

Stake Lake Star Park & Observatory

The Stake Lake Star Park is an open area of land in the staging grounds for Overlander Ski Club's cross country ski meets. The skies can be very clear and dark from this location, and it's a great spot to bring your binoculars, telescopes and lawn chairs to enjoy the night skies.

The KAS Observatory: Please note the observatory currently does not have regularly scheduled hours of operation, and is entirely volunteer operated by KAS members.
Please look at the "Scheduled Events" section of the main page or contact the KAS to learn of any scheduled public viewing sessions.

Directions to Viewing Site
To get to the Stake Lake Star Park from Kamloops, drive up Lac le Jeune Road and proceed to park at the main Stake Lake Ski trails entrance.

To get to the main viewing area, from the parking lot just follow the trail to the right of the lake around to the open field before the observatory.
Bring your binoculars, telescopes and lawn chairs and enjoy the night skies!

Please note this is a walk in site, vehicle access is normally restricted by locked gate except for planned observing nights and special events.

During the winter we close the observatory. If you do want to access the viewing area, there'll probably be plenty of snow so you'll need to wear appropriate foot wear (skiis or snowshoes) and be sure to avoid damaging the maintained tracked ski trails as we share this area with the Overlander Ski Club.

Important! Please note the following safety concerns!

- When visiting the observatory site, please be sure to wear sensible outdoor footwear and appropriate clothing for cold outdoor evenings.

- After dark, in order to help preserve everyone's dark adapted eyes, please avoid using bright lights. Instead, bring a red-light flashlight so you can safely see your way around without blinding everyone else looking at the stars. :-)

Freshly Painted Dome (July 2012)

A big thanks to Kim and Jonathan for putting a fresh coat of paint on the observatory dome this week.

Special thanks to General Paint in Kamloops (6th and St. Paul) for donating the paint for this project!

Stake Lake Observatory Grand Opening (October 2010)

Stake Lake Observatory - Dome origins and the move to Stake Lake

Dome Origins and Construction

The observatory dome was built in 1985 by Gerry Bernard for Murray Foubister, and it was donated to the KAS in 2010. KAS members carefully moved and lovingly reassembled the dome at the Stake Lake site, and it is still an ongoing project to make it fully functional and (hopefully) better than ever!

The following is a brief history of the origins of the dome, as told by Joan Bernard:

"My father, Gerry Bernard, built the dome in pieces in his garage in Edmonton. He was a retired engineer with a 2 1/2 car garage full of tools (and no room for the cars), so when Murray Foubister suggested the project of building an observatory for the back yard in Kamloops, Gerry was intrigued - this was a project that was going to be a challenge - hard enough to be interesting!

Murray got the plans from Sky and Telescope ( or ordered them through that magazine) and Gerry started to work. He had to make a number of jigs to create the curved pieces for the frame of the roof of the dome, with each wooden piece having an outer curve of different radius from the inner curve. He probably also machined some pieces for the complex system of rollers and pulleys to open the door, as well as rollers for the upper half of the dome to rotate smoothly on the lower part. Once he had all the pieces, including rolls of the thin sheetmetal to be used for the outside "skin" of the dome, he loaded everything up on a custom frame (also made by him) on his old pickup truck, and headed for Kamloops.

Amazingly enough, it only took one load to bring tools and parts to Kamloops, so it was a very heavily loaded truck. Once here, Gerry unloaded, and he and Murray assembled the bottom half and bolted it together to stand in a hole specially dug for it at the original location in the front yard at our house on Clarke Street. The next few weeks were less than enjoyable for the neighbours as the sounds of construction started early in the morning and carried on all day until it was finished. The top half rotated smoothly on the rollers, and was powered by a small electric motor.

All was well then, until we moved a couple of years later up the hill to the house on Wentworth Place where the dome rested until the Kamloops Astronomical Society team moved it to its present location at Stake Lake.

Gerry came back from Edmonton to engineer and supervise the move to Wentworth Place. The top half of the dome was not going to come apart - we knew it had enough material and so many screws holding the skin on that we commented that it was strong enough to land a helicopter on (no engineering studies done to actually prove this). Gerry rented a small flat bed and once again came to Kamloops bearing tools and parts, this time parts of a framework to hold the dome at an angle so it was a narrower width (legal to drive in town on the flatbed trailer).

The bottom half was dismantled into sections and carried easily in the pickup truck up to be assembled in the hole dug for it in the hillside behind the house. When the flatbed and dome arrived, Gerry had figured out a winch system to basically drag it (with some kind of rollers underneath) up the small treed slope to the spot prepared for it.

A crew consisting of Murray, some friends and some very helpful neighbours lifted the top half of the observatory and succeeded in placing it into position onto the bottom half. Success!

I think that the excitement of the dome project had worn off with the stress of the move, since Gerry then declared that the dome only came with one move - if we wanted to move it again, he wouldn't be available, but was planning on being in Hawaii!

Luckily for all involved, the Kamloops Astronomical Society came along with a well organized crew of strong volunteers and successfully made the observatory's second move in 2010 - this time to its present location at Stake Lake."