Carolyn Collins Petersen is CEO of Loch Ness Productions.

She is an award-winning science writer with more than two dozen Loch Ness Productions shows and eight books to her credit and is responsible for show development, editing and writing contracts, and other outreach services for Loch Ness Productions clients. Carolyn has also created shows for major planetaria across the U.S. including the 2016 production of Edge of Darkness for Evans & Sutherland. Her most recent fulldome show is EXOPLANETS - Discovering New Worlds, which she wrote, narrated, and co-produced.

In 2014, Carolyn narrated and co-produced the show Losing the Dark, a joint production with the International Dark-Sky Association. Over the years, Carolyn has acted as technical and content consultant for shows from such producers as Albedo Fulldome and Creative Planet.

Exhibitions

In recent years, Carolyn has also been involved in planning and writing several major science exhibits projects in the U.S. and Asia. These include:

  •  Shanghai Astronomical Museum, entire exhibits collection

  •  "History of Exploration", NASA JPL Von Kármán Visitor Center

  •  "California's Altered State", California Academy of Sciences exhibit on climate change

  •  Griffith Observatory's entire exhibits collection

  •  "Electricity and Magnetism", Acton Children's Museum

Web-based Productions and Animations

From 2007-2010, Carolyn wrote and co-produced a nine-part vodcast series titled Space Weather FX for a NASA-funded program with MIT Haystack Observatory.

From 2008-2010, Carolyn wrote and co-produced a vodcast series titled Astronomy Behind the Headlines for a grant-funded program through the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

From 2008 to 2014, Carolyn served as associate producer for AstroCast.TV, an online video magazine focused on astronomy and space science topics. She created segments called Our Night Sky and The Astronomer's Universe on a monthly and bimonthly basis. In 2009, she wrote and produced a 10-minute video program about the Murchison Widefield Array. In addition, Carolyn wrote and narrated a series of scripts for animations inside Seeker and TheSky, astronomy software programs created and produced by Software Bisque.

Observatories and Outreach

Carolyn served as Associate Editor of GeminiFocus from 2002-2012 published by Gemini Observatory and worked with the National Astronomy Observatory of Japan's Subaru Telescope in Hawai'i.

Carolyn is an accomplished public speaker, and appeared on behalf of Smithsonian Travels on more than 35 selected cruise ships and land-based expeditions. She has made presentations on planetarium outreach at several symposia, including the semi-annual Communicating Astronomy to the Public meetings, as well as the 2006 International Planetarium Society conference in Australia.

On the Web, Carolyn is proprietor of TheSpacewriter.com, and The Spacewriter's Ramblings, a blog about astronomy, science, and related subjects. You can see more about her various projects here.

Post-Graduate Career

From 1997 through 2000, Carolyn served at Sky Publishing Corporation, as Editor of Books & Products, Editor of SkyWatch magazine, and Associate Editor of Sky & Telescope magazine.

Carolyn's published articles have appeared YahooNews, in The Radcliffe Quarterly, as well as Sky & Telescope, SkyWatch, Astronomy, and StarDate magazines. In addition, her work has been showcased in MIT's TechTalk. Her submissions to the Griffith Observatory/Hughes Aircraft science writing contest won First Place in 1992 and Honorable Mention in 1995. Her 1985 article for The Denver Post, "The Lightning Makers," was selected as one of the 100 best science stories of that year. In 1988, she wrote "Jupiter," for a children's book series called Exploration of Space, published by Facts on File. She was also an invited contributor to the Van Nostrand Reinhold Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Education and Memberships

Carolyn earned a masters' degree in journalism and mass communications from the University of Colorado - Boulder, where she was a Professional Research Associate with the Hubble Space Telescope's Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph team at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. She also coordinated observations for the Ulysses Comet Watch project.

Carolyn is director emeritus of the Immersive Media Entertainment, Research, Science & Arts (IMERSA) organization. She is also a member of the Jackson Wild Collective, a wildlife and science filmmaking organization and has served as a judge for several of its film festivals.

Carolyn served as the Publications Chair for the International Planetarium Society (1985-1990) and is an IPS Fellow. While on IPS Council, she spearheaded a major redesign and redirection of The Planetarian, and worked to produce several guidebooks written by planetarium professionals. She is a former President of the Rocky Mountain Planetarium Association (1987-1989) and served as its first Newsletter Editor. She has taught workshops on planetarium script writing and science writing at planetarium conferences, at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and led three writing workshops at the University of Massachusetts - Lowell's annual Women in Science and Engineering Days. In 1993, she was elected to membership in Kappa Tau Alpha, the national journalism honorary society.

Carolyn is a member of the American Astronomical Society and the National Association of Science Writers.