ReportAt the gates of the Mercantour National Park, the exceptionally dark starry sky offers a dazzling spectacle. And a haven for nocturnal species.
It is 8:42 p.m. in the wood of Moulière, at an altitude of 1,626 meters, above the village of Entraunes (Alpes-Maritimes) in the Mercantour national park. The sun has just set. Only a delicate pink fringe persists on the edge of the Col des Champs, on the opposite slope, on the other side of the Var valley which has its source here. A trio of deer take advantage of the twilight to graze in the meadows, surrounded by Scots pines, boxwood and junipers. Night is falling. “Don’t light your lamp, in twenty minutes your eyes will be accustomed to the darkness, you will see your feet and even your shadow, with or without the moon”assures Anthony Turpaud, warden of the Mercantour National Park and photographer specializing in the starry vault.
In Entraunes, the ancient bell tower with a shingle roof is no longer lit so as not to disturb the colony of small horseshoe bats which come in the summer to reproduce in the framework.
You don’t give a lot of your own skin by taking the first steps without a headlamp on the GR 52A – the Mercantour panoramic –, in the middle of the long silhouettes of the now black silver fir trees. But as time goes by, a small torrent crossed and tall grass trodden with the sound of crumpled silk for a few hundred meters, the atmosphere becomes exhilarating. We hope for the hoot of a Tengmalm’s owl or an owl which this night does not respond, all busy nesting that they are. And the wolves? silently suggests the reptilian part of the brain. “Hearing them screaming in the dark gives another dimension to the night”replies with a laugh Anthony Turpaud who spends part of his time on the peaks, scanning the sky.
It is that it is sumptuous here. In this part of the Southern Alps, a vast piece of territory, which extends over 2,300 square kilometers from Grasse to the remote valleys of Mercantour, has, since 2019, been classified as an International Dark Sky Reserve (RICE), awarded by the International Dark-Sky Association, based in the United States. This label rewards an exceptional night sky, attested by measurements of darkness, now extremely rare in Europe and pledge of contemplation of thousands of stars. There are about twenty in the world including four in France.
Arcturus and Vega
But if the stars are still there, the weather remains fickle. So much so that this night, above the wood of Moulière, a cloudy veil thwarts the contemplation of the constellation Bouvier, to the south, of which only Arcturus, one of the brightest stars in the northern hemisphere, slightly orange, deign to show off. We cling to see Vega, which nevertheless sparkles with a thousand lights in the constellation of Lyra. We are forced to imagine Berenice’s Hair and the Northern Crown, visible in the spring, which should have rewarded our nocturnal effort. We will be free to return on a clear day in order to treat ourselves to the dizziness of seeing, with the naked eye, the Andromeda galaxy, the closest neighbor of our Solar System, 2.5 million light-years away.
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