Losing the Dark

A Free-for-Download Public Service Announcement

We’ve been extremely gratified at the response to Losing the Dark, the short video we produced in collaboration with the International Dark-Sky Association and released earlier this year. It focuses on the problems of and solutions to light pollution, and was produced in two versions—fulldome for digital planetarium theaters, and conventional flat-screen video, for use by outreach professionals and educators in public presentations, in the classroom, and in classic planetarium theaters.

Light pollution is a problem that many people are just starting to learn about. Oftentimes it is just considered a “city” problem, or an “American” problem, but in reality, it affects people, animals, and plants around the world. For this reason, the IDA Education committee decided to do a short show that would bring a simple message about light pollution to domed theaters, classrooms, and lecture halls around the globe.

As just one measure of how useful the show has been, its YouTube pages have garnered tens of thousands of hits. We are still tallying download statistics, but it’s clear that a good number of planetarians, science educators, and outreach specialists around the world have downloaded the show in fulldome and flat-screen format. Many others have contacted us for frames to slice and encode for their theaters. In addition, initial surveys done by the IDA of people who have been using the video have been very positive and we’re quite pleased with their reactions. Most folks are using it before or after their live sky talks, or in conjunction with other shows. We’re especially pleased that a number of classic planetarium facilities are using the flat-screen version on their domes, as we hoped.

Mark C. Petersen shows off the Jena Fulldome Festival Honorable Mention plaque we were awarded for Losing the Dark.

We were honored to show Losing the Dark at the Jena Fulldome Festival in May, where it garnered an Honorable Mention for its message and presentation values. We will be showcasing it at the Communicating Astronomy with the Public meeting in October in Warsaw at the Copernicus Science Center, and I will be presenting a paper there outlining its main educational points.

If you’d like to have this show for your dome, you’ll find a myriad of download possibilities on our Web site. Losing the Dark has no license fee and is a free movie download for many theaters. For those facilities requiring frames to encode or slice, we can ship the fulldome show on a USB drive at a very minimal cost. As we’ve mentioned in a previous posting, the show is currently available in eleven languages, with more in the pipeline!

Light pollution is an issue we can all help solve and Losing the Dark is a short and effective tool to help educate your audiences about working together to bring the dark of night back to planet Earth.