LOCH NESS PRODUCTIONS BLOG

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.

Meet the IBEX Mission

We get a lot of science news announcements across our desks at Loch Ness Productions. Every day there’s a discovery or a new result in astronomy that expands humanity’s collective knowledge of the cosmos just a bit more. These are perfect fodder for fulldome shows.

A couple of weeks ago we received a press release announcing that NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) mission successfully mapped the boundaries of the Sun’s heliosphere—the region of space that is surrounded in a “bubble” of charged particles flowing out through the solar wind. The heliosphere encompasses the entire solar system, and its limit (that is, where it contacts interstellar space) is called the heliopause. It turns out, based on the IBEX studies, that the heliosphere is shaped more like a comet tail than a circular bubble.

Interestingly enough, astronomers have long spotted such tails around other stars, but finding our own star’s tail has been more difficult. IBEX mapped the extent of it by measuring neutral particles that are created by collisions between the solar wind and interstellar gas at the heliosphere’s boundaries.

As part of the IBEX mission’s outreach, the Adler Planetarium in Chicago produced a fulldome show called IBEX: Search for the Edge of the Solar System. It really gives a nice introduction to the mission and helps audiences understand the spacecraft’s accomplishments. The show does this by including IBEX scientists and engineers in the presentation, and explains the mission from start to finish, through the eyes of a pair of inquisitive teenagers.

We personally like the show because it carefully explains a topic that can be difficult to visualize: the effects and extent of the Sun’s influence. It was produced not long after we finished work on a series of online videos about space weather and the effects of the Sun called Space Weather FX for MIT’s Haystack Observatory. From that experience we knew how complex it is to tell the story of the Sun’s influence.

IBEX: Search for the Edge of the Solar System utilizes a number of science visualizations to teach about this remarkable spacecraft and its mission. The show was created specifically for fulldome and the producers did a great job of utilizing the immersive space to tell the spacecraft’s remarkable story. As IBEX continues to explore the extent of the interactions between the solar wind and the interstellar medium, there will likely be more discoveries announced. Theaters with the IBEX show in repertory will have a decided advantage as they use the show to help explain this marvelous spacecraft’s ongoing mission and accomplishments.

We’re pleased to be distributing this show in partnership with Adler. It emphasizes a number of STEM topics, including astronomy and an exploration of the states of matter, to help audiences understand what IBEX is detecting.

And for those working with tight budgets, we should point out the IBEX show has no license fee. We charge a nominal fee for encoding the movies into the various formats required by fulldome systems.