LOCH NESS PRODUCTIONS BLOG

First, an historical review…

Nearly 50 years ago, we began a company called Loch Ness Monster Productions to sell Geodesium space music by Mark C. Petersen. Over time, the word “monster” went away, and we morphed into Loch Ness Productions, a full-fledged planetarium and fulldome show production and distribution company. Ten years ago, we added FULLDOME OnDemand, now a very popular streaming service.

We’ve had a fulfilling 48 years serving the dome community and working with our fellow producers to get content onto domes. We’ve shipped more than three thousand shows to hundreds of planetarium facilities worldwide, reaching millions of viewers. We know that LNP shows have touched people’s lives in many ways. We have colleagues who grew up seeing Larry Cat in Space as students at their local planetarium, and they eventually became planetarium directors showing it to their students. Now we get mail from the next generation of visitors, recalling their childhood memories of seeing such shows as SpacePark360: Geodesium Edition at their local planetarium.

It’s also been our honor and pleasure to represent some of the finest shows from other producers around the world — some of the most beautiful and imaginative works in the fulldome medium.

In addition to our professional work, we also volunteered our time with planetarium organizations. We were honored to serve on the Executive Council of the International Planetarium Society in the 1980s — Mark as Treasurer and Membership chair, and Carolyn as Publications chair. We each served as President of the Rocky Mountain Planetarium Association. We were founding members of IMERSA, and Carolyn served on their board of directors for 7 years.

Through all this, our main work has been getting content onto people’s domes. Mark has spent many a conversation, on the phone or in email, helping colleagues install shows on their systems, answering questions about technical aspects as well as content.

Some numbers and credits…

As distributors of other people’s shows, we’ve paid their producers more than a million dollars in long-term show licensing fees since 2010. We’ve also provided a new source of income for producers via FULLDOME OnDemand streaming; over 120,000 dollars… and counting.

Mark provided soundtracks for more than 67 shows over the years, leading to 16 albums of Geodesium planetarium space music available to the general public on physical discs and tapes, and now from streaming sources such as Apple Music, Spotify, and many others.

In addition to her show writing, Carolyn has also worked as an exhibit and content writer for science centers and museum facilities. Her credits include the entire Griffith Observatory exhibition; the von Kármán visitor center exhibits for NASA/JPL, as well as a California Academy of Sciences exhibition about climate change; exhibition consulting for the Shanghai Astronomical Museum; and in 2024, creating a script for Lowell Observatory’s Dark Sky Planetarium. She continues to author articles (most recently as a regular contributor to UniverseToday) and books for publishers in the U.S. and the UK; she currently has 7 books to her name. She’s also been a successful astronomy lecturer aboard more than 35 cruise ships over the years, was an editor at Sky & Telescope for several years, and worked on a Hubble Space Telescope instrument team, all while getting a graduate degree from the University of Colorado.

We’ve both worked quietly but respectfully with our colleagues in the planetarium/fulldome community and were honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the DomeFest West organization in 2022. One of our short shows won an Honorable Award at the Jena Fulldome Festival in 2013.

We’ve truly enjoyed helping so many people explore the wonders of the Universe.

However — there’s always a “however” — all good things must come to an end.

Finally, the Big News: Retirement

Effective 30 June 2025, we’re closing down the customer-facing side of Loch Ness Productions. After that, Loch Ness Productions will transition to become a holding company for receiving the income and royalties from our intellectual properties — our planetarium shows, Mark’s music, and Carolyn’s ongoing writing and consulting projects. In essence, we’re returning to our roots.

What we won’t be doing is running the office, producing and distributing shows and products.

That’s not to say LNP shows are going away. There’s a continuing market for our own titles, and they will remain available through our reseller partners. While our copyrights won’t expire until 70 years after we do, in this digital age, our works may live on practically “forever”.

As for FULLDOME OnDemand, we’re transferring ownership and operation to the crew at ePlanetarium. In the decade since we created this service, it has provided shows to hundreds of domes. It’s clear this is a valuable service, and we wish our friends at ePlanetarium all the best as they drive it into the future.

“So long, and thanks for all the fish!” — Douglas Adams

We thank the many clients of ours who bought our show licenses, purchased MUSIC BACK-PACK Library volumes, Geodesium discs and tapes, artwork images, software, and other items from us. It’s been an interesting 48 years, and we’re proud to have been part of the history of the planetarium as it has evolved. We hope you’ll wish us well in our curated retirement activities.

Keep looking up and exploring the Universe!

2022 was a productive period here at Loch Ness Productions. Our business continued its rebound from the pandemic shutdowns. We were particularly pleased to note the return of users for our popular FULLDOME OnDemand streaming service.

Here in our production studios, we were able to update some computer systems and projection equipment. As a result, our PixelDome will shortly become a nice 4K theater.

Loch Ness Productions was honored to be given the coveted Lifetime Achievement Award late last year by Dome Fest West, one of the dome community’s premier fulldome and immersive festivals.

In citing our many years of work, DFW executive director Ryan Moore noted our pioneering status in planetarium and fulldome content. “The award is long-deserved. Mark and Carolyn Collins Petersen have been at the forefront of fulldome for more than four decades, and their contributions have had a lasting impact on the field,” he said. “We are honored to give them this award and to recognize their lifetime achievement.”

Our CEO, Carolyn Collins Petersen, attended as one of the judges for the festival. She and her cohorts on the judging team were tasked with watching more than a hundred fulldome and immersive pieces of content and deciding on the best of the show.

The Lifetime Achievement citation came at the end of the Awards Gala, and was a marvelous surprise and capstone to a wonderful event.

Part Two: Finding the First Exoplanets

In the last blog entry, I shared an introduction to exoplanets and the search for these distant worlds. The first possible evidence for an exoplanet lies in data collected at the Mount Wilson Observatory in 1917. It’s a spectrum of material orbiting van Maanan’s star (van Maanen 2). This is a solitary white dwarf about 14 light-years away from Earth. That data suggested the existence of an exoplanet orbiting the star. Unfortunately, no such companion has been found in the intervening years. But, the idea was certainly on the minds of astronomers as far back as the early 20th century and they had the means to begin the search.

The actual detection and confirmation of distant worlds around other stars had to wait until much later in the 20th Century. One of the most intriguing exoplanet discoveries was among the earliest detections made. It is a multi-planet system, orbiting the pulsar PSR 1257+12. The grouping lies about 2,300 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Virgo. Astronomers Dale Frail and Aleksander Wolszczan found this system using radio telescopes. They were actually measuring pulsation period of the rapidly rotating neutron star at the heart of the system. It was a rather startling discovery. That’s because, at that time, most astronomers thought there was no way a pulsar could have planets.

What about those Pulsar Planets?

In doing the research for our new show, EXOPLANETS – Discovering New Worlds, I had a chance to dig more deeply into the story of these worlds. They managed to survive the explosion of the supernova event that created the pulsar. Now, it’s not considered too likely they would be habitable worlds—since they are scorched by the pulsar’s radiation. But, one of them, PSR B1257 +112 b is a terrestrial-type world. That is, it’s a rocky world with a mass of 0.02 Earth masses. It orbits the pulsar once every 25.3 days. According to NASA’s Exoplanets site, the three worlds around this pulsar have been nicknamed Poltergeist, Phobetor, and Draugr. Those are ghostly characters from literature (including Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Norse legends). This theme fits, since the worlds around the pulsar would be dead, ghost planets.

It’s intriguing to imagine what they might be like, so we “visited” one in our show. After all, as every planetarian knows, audience members have heard of pulsars. So, what better tale to tell than about pulsar planets?

Living with a Pulsar

Conditions around a pulsar are intense. Remember that a pulsar has a tremendously strong magnetic influence on its nearby environment. That’s because a neutron star emitting the pulsar signal has a magnetic field a trillion times stronger than Earth’s field. That creates an incredibly strong radiation environment. In addition, strong magnetic fields generate powerful electrical fields, which have extremely high electrical potentials. The electrical potential contained in just one square meter of space around the Crab Nebula pulsar contains more energy than we’ve ever generated here on Earth.

Future Tourist Traps? Probably Not

So, imagine you’re on a planet that lies within that massive magnetic field or—even worse—it’s in the radiation “beamline”. You’d be standing in a very lethal environment. It’s highly doubtful there’d be any surface water on the planet or much of anything else. In other words, it would very likely be a scorched cinder; not a very safe place to be.

Such a place might be good for a very short visit by explorers someday. Maybe they’ll be searching for artifacts from civilizations that may have inhabited the world in the distant past. Those aren’t the prime motivators in the search for exoplanets—life is. But, it’s interesting to think about what those pulsar planets were like before their parent star went through a metamorphosis of its own.