The next generation of our popular classic show from 2001, MarsQuest now features new fulldome graphics and animations to accompany Patrick Stewart's original eloquent narration. You can watch the trailer (or download it) — as well as view the entire show — from our Previews and Prices page. And don't miss MarsQuest In Depth, a "writer's cut" page where Carolyn discusses the background of this fascinating new take on a perennial favorite.

We're adding Flash multimedia players for our online music and video clips. With most modern browsers already having the capability to play Flash media, it should provide you with quicker (if not instant) gratification. Try them on our Videos page, or on A Gentle Rain Of Starlight page.

We've added new pages for our video production and outreach services, to describe some of our recent non-planetarium projects. For now, they're easily accessible from our home page; eventually, they'll get their own navigation buttons in the left column.

Posted a few nice reviews of the latest Geodesium album A Gentle Rain Of Starlight on our Reviews page.

We've been getting an increasing number of queries lately about getting our fulldome shows translated and produced in languages other than English.

Things aren't quite as simple as they used to be, so we've written a new Translations page describing the process.

We've added "Play all MP3 clips" links so you can audition every track in the MUSIC BACK-PACK Library.

Ever since the olden days of dial-up connections, we'd always provided audio excerpts from a few selected tracks on each of our Geodesium albums. Not every track; we figured people would get the general idea from the picks we'd chosen.

Nowadays, when you can download and play every track from a variety of other sources (Amazon.com, CD Baby, iTunes, Napster, to name a few) it seemed rather mingy of us not to follow suit ourselves.

So we've remedied the situation, and posted samples of every track from every Geodesium album for your listening (and we hope ordering) enjoyment.

Check out A Gentle Rain Of Starlight, the first Geodesium album of planetarium space music to feature music that we've produced in this century!

With some selections featured in our Seasonal STARGAZING fulldome shows, this new collection of celestial soundscapes promises to provide the next generation of planetarium audiences with the sounds they (and you!) have come to expect under a starry night sky.

We hope you enjoy A Gentle Rain Of Starlight for years to come!

It began as an add-on to the classic planetarium show package. Now, Fito Gato En El Espacio is a full-fledged product on its own.

Take off on a lunar adventure with a curious stowaway cat...

What are we, crazy? Nope. Think of it as updating the traditional green-arrow show for the new digital millennium.

Seasonal STARGAZING is the first package of its kind in the fulldome world: four seasonal star shows, each produced with a male-narrated and female-narrated version, and each of those available in two lengths: FULL shows averaging 14 minutes, and MINI shows about 7 minutes long. That comes to 16 shows, all in one convenient package!

While pre-recorded star shows may seem anathema to seasoned planetarians who pride themselves on their years of experience presenting "green-arrow" shows, not every show presenter can be on call 24/7... and on top of their game for every audience.

A few years ago, a client approached us with a surprising request: a series of pre-recorded star talks. It seems he wasn't able to find and train enough staffers who would be qualified to present all the shows in their schedule. Alors! Now, some of our coolest show ideas have come from our customers. So when we finished our client's custom project, we decided to make our own versions for fulldome distribution. The Seasonal STARGAZING package was born.

In today's changing planetarium world, there are hundreds of fulldome video theaters with a diverse array of programming needs. Some have decades of traditional planetarium heritage to build upon while others are starting anew with a fresh perspective on our profession. We think there's surely a place for good constellation identification content. Seasonal STARGAZING is our old friend — the "what's up in the sky" star talk — fully realized in the medium of today, digital fulldome video.

Crazy? Maybe not. As we started telling people about these shows, the usual response has been "When will they be ready?"

They're ready...

Since 1989, we've shipped hundreds of thousands of hand-mounted 35mm slides to our Classic Planetarium Shows and Image Library customers around the world.

Now after 18 years, we've had to shut down the Loch Ness Productions slide manufacturing facility. The reason is simple — reliable sources for the mounts and film we used for making slides have disappeared.

If you continue to work with slide projectors, and still have the resources to make and mount your own slides, good for you! Loch Ness Productions will continue to provide you with digital source material — images and masks — from which you can do your thing. We've been doing that for years.

We do have some stock image slides and a couple of show slide sets left on the shelf, so be sure to check with us to see what might yet be available.

However, for upcoming planetarium shows, we encourage you to acquire fulldome video technology. That's where we're focusing our production efforts these days.

We look forward to serving your future show production needs.

Here's last year's news, in case you haven't been here for a while and want to catch up.

Mark C. Petersen, webmaster