News From The Nessies

Greetings from the Rocky Mountain state of Massachusetts! In this presentation, we'll fill you in on what's been happening at Loch Ness Productions during the past year since our "News From The Nessies" talk at last year's California conference.

We started out 1999 by creating a custom program called the Spirit of Discovery, for the Junior Museum in Troy, New York. Museum director Ralph Pascale recently bought a Digistar projector from Evans & Sutherland. His challenge to us: to create an Digistar-only planetarium show, complete with narration, original music, and Digistar visuals. So far, not too hard. To make things interesting, he had no planetarium theater (it was still in the planning stages). So, the show would run in a temporary dome set up in the ice rink/field house on the nearby campus of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Our deadline? The show had to start running April 5, 1999 the opening day of Space Week festivities, part of RPI's 175 year anniversary celebration. Astronauts, scientists, politicians, and the NASA administrator were all scheduled to appear during the week; a big event for the folks in Troy and the Albany metro area.

Mark enlisted the aid of Digistar programmer Jim Hashimoto (photo above) to put together the visuals, and contracted Sky-Skan to supply their traveling dome, lights, and sound system (photo below).

Evans & Sutherland agreed to the unusual arrangement of installing the Digistar in an inflatable dome with about 60 folding chairs in a sports field house for a week (photo below).

Several miracles later, the show was finished! We showed director Ralph Pascale (above)how to use his new toy and they were up and running for a week of sold-out shows, 7 or 8 shows a day (photo below). It was really a lot of hard work that was a success for all!

We've been on the road as usual, attending the MAPS meeting in Lancaster, PA in May. In June, we participated in an Electric Sky Workshop at Spitz, Inc. in Chadds Ford, PA. We were invited to present "Light Years From Andromeda" at the SEPA conference later that month. Then in August, we were in Germany Carolyn presented a paper about Professional-Amateur Cooperation in Astronomy at a meeting held at the European Southern Observatory, while Mark visited planetaria in Munich, Nuernburg, and Augsburg. And there just happened to be a total solar eclipse at the same time. You can see pictures of all this on our Web site, on the "News From The Nessies" page at http://www.lochness.com.

But enough about us, you probably want to know what we have in store for you! How about some new shows?

"Sky Quest" the show we'll be premiering on Friday was a custom program we created for the Einstein Planetarium of the Smithsonian Institution's National Air & Space Museum. It was first conceived as a school/family show but it's far exceeded that mission. Director Cheryl Bauer tells us it's one of the most-requested shows they have, playing to all sorts of audiences.

It features a young girl who discovers the light from Sirius left that star at the time she was born, and arrived for her to see it when she was nearly 9 years old. This inspires her to learn more about the night sky, and she grows up to be an astronomer, and builds an observatory in the mountains to continue her sky quest. It's narrated by Roxann Dawson, continuing our tradition of using Star Trek talent for our shows. She plays B'Elanna Torres on Star Trek: Voyager. For this particular show, we're teaming up with Sky-Skan; they'll be handling the billing and distribution. The show will be offered with your choice of DVD or CAV laserdisc; if you get the DVD, the soundtrack will be in 5.1 surround sound (and the video will look better). Yes, there will be video, and pans, and all-skies you'll need a capable planetarium facility to run it. It won't be for the "faint-of-dome".

Another new show we'll be coming out with in the spring is called "Oceans In Space". We produced it for a planetarium in Springfield, Massachusetts, to accompany a traveling exhibit on underwater photography. This show talks about how life as we know it needs water, warmth, and organic materials it could have begun in tropical lagoons, or perhaps near undersea volcanic vents (this makes a great all-sky). Could such conditions exist elsewhere? Not Mercury, Venus, or the Moon. We look to Mars, talk about its ancient history, discuss SNC meteorites. We go to Europa, which might have favorable conditions for life. What about stars around other planets? Hubble has seen protoplanetary disks. We end on an alien planet with a futuristic tropical lagoon, and the landing party of our distant descendants stepping through the waves onto the shore of a new world. It's narrated by Avery Brooks, Captain Sisko of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. This show will also have pans, all-skies, video, and an appropriately hefty price tag.

We do have plans for a new Mars show. We've been awarded a contract to produce one to accompany a touring exhibition called Mars Quest, with funding from the Space Sciences Institute, the Association of Science-Technology Centers, and the National Science Foundation. But the exhibit is a little behind schedule, and won't start touring until fall of 2000. This is okay, since we can then put in findings from Mars Polar Lander and we'll have more Global Surveyor data. We'll all just have to wait patiently.

We're going to be updating our classic "Hubble Vision" program. But we're having a little debate, and can use your input. Mark wants to focus strictly on Hubble findings; after all, we have 5 more years of nifty stuff to talk about since the last show.

Carolyn wants to include material from other orbiting spacecraft such as Chandra, and also some cutting-edge ground-based work as well, to make it a more generic "Vision of the Universe" type show. So, let us know what you think. Whatever approach we decide to take, we plan on having the show available next summer, and it will be the more conventional slides-only type show, one that every facility can run.

Speaking of classics, Mark's been working on some projects long requested by many of you. He's gone back and remastered his first two albums, "Geodesium" and "Double Eclipse", and we're recording custom CDs for those who want to have a complete collection. In retrospect, we probably should have bought a CD recorder years ago. Since we started offering planetarium show soundtracks on CD, it's become the format of choice. We still get a few orders for cassettes and ADATs, but CDs seem to be the most popular.

Coming up soon will be the Music Back-Pack Library on compact disc. Mark has gone back to the original tapes and remastered them, using the Noise Reduction plugin for Sound Forge to remove the last vestiges of analog tape hiss and otherwise clean up the tracks. We haven't quite finished the project; all 16 of the original volumes have been digitized, and we'll be adding new tracks to them, including the new music in "Light Years From Andromeda". Watch the Web site for details.

And coming in January 1900, the Y2K Edition of the LNP Planetarium Compendium, our directory of planetaria world-wide. Okay, make that January of 2000!

As always, our Web site is the place to go for the latest news about our products. The URL is simple to remember lochness.com. For all our planetarium shows, we have script excerpts you can read; soundtrack samples you can download and play on your sound card; slide lists to view with images in color, and of course you can order online. You can preview all 600-plus images in our slide library online, you can check out our Geodesium albums too.

If you've been to the Web site, you know our list of links to Planetarium Web Sites is the best on the Net; we list the URLs of nearly 500 planetaria around the world. We also have a good portion of the LNP Planetarium Compendium online, in hypertext form; you can send email to a planetarian colleague just by clicking on their address. By the way, I do have a couple of copies of the current print edition, only 9 months old, in case anyone needs one.

The Web site also has a Planetarium Reference Library section, where you find useful articles, like our periodic tallying of the world's planetarium attendance.

"Yeah, right", we hear you say, "they don't call it the World Wide Wait for nothing. I have a slow modem, and all these downloads could take forever." No problem. We have here the entire Loch Ness Web site on compact disc. You just point your Web browser to the CD instead of the Internet, and you'll have everything as fast as your CD-ROM drive can deliver it. The CD is yours for the asking! And of course, you can always call us toll-free at 1-888-4-NESSIE.

[18] Thanks for your support, and we'll see you next year in Texas.