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Carolyn Collins Petersen is an award-winning science writer with more than two dozen Loch Ness Productions shows to her credit. She has also written custom scripts for Evans & Sutherland Corporation, and for major planetaria in Washington D.C., Chicago, St. Louis, Lincoln, Springfield (MA), and Cocoa. Carolyn has taught several workshops on planetarium script writing and science writing, including a four-week Winter Session class in 2006 at Williams College, Williamstown, MA.

Current projects in development with production partners in the planetarium, museum, and astronomy software communities include: Red Planet Rovers a fulldome video planetarium show about Mars; a 9-part vodcast series on space weather for a NASA-funded Loch Ness Productions-MIT Haystack Observatory project; and a series of scripts and voice-overs for animations included with Seeker, an astronomy software program created and produced by Software Bisque.

Through her consulting firm, C. Collins Petersen Productions, Carolyn provides writing and editing services to a variety of astronomy-related clients, including Gemini Observatory, where she serves as associate editor of GeminiFocus and works on other public outreach projects. She also writes and edits material for the public outreach office of the National Astronomy Observatory of Japan's Subaru Observatory in Hawaii.

In 2005 and 2006, Carolyn worked in conjunction with the Friends of the Observatory and New York City-based exhibit designers C&G Partners as the senior science writer for the Griffith Observatory exhibits program, which opened in November 2006. In addition, she consults with other museums and planetarium-related companies for exhibit writing and software documentation.

Carolyn is an accomplished public speaker, and regularly presents public astronomy lectures around the U.S. and Canada.

On the Web, Carolyn is proprietor of TheSpacewriter.com, a popular website that contains the Henrietta Leavitt Flat Screen Space Theater — the Web's first and foremost online planetarium show, and The Spacewriter's Ramblings, a blog about astronomy, science, and related subjects.

Carolyn has written or edited several popular astronomy books. Her most recent was Visions of the Cosmos, written with John C. Brandt and published in December 2003 by Cambridge University Press.

She was the lead author of the book "Hubble Vision," published in 1995, revised in 1998, published by Cambridge University Press, also co-written with Dr. John C. Brandt.

She co-edited (with J. Kelly Beatty and Andrew Chaikin) "The New Solar System," Fourth Edition, co-published by Sky Publishing Corporation and Cambridge University Press.

Carolyn's published articles have appeared in Sky & Telescope, SkyWatch, Astronomy, and StarDate magazines, and MIT's TechTalk. In the 1990s her submissions to the Griffith Observatory/Hughes Aircraft science writing contest won First Place in 1992 and Honorable Mention in 1995. Her 1985 article for The Denver Post, "The Lightning Makers," was selected as one of the 100 best science stories of that year. In 1988, she wrote "Jupiter," for a children's book series called Exploration of Space, published by Facts on File. She was also an invited contributor to the Van Nostrand Reinhold Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Carolyn served as Editor of Books & Products at Sky Publishing Corporation, as well as Editor of SkyWatch Magazine, and Associate Editor of Sky & Telescope magazine from 1997 to 2000.

Carolyn earned a masters' degree in journalism and mass communications from the University of Colorado - Boulder, where she was a Professional Research Associate with the Hubble Space Telescope's Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph team at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. She also coordinated observations for the Ulysses Comet Watch project.

Carolyn served as the Publications Chair for the International Planetarium Society (1985-1990) and is an IPS Fellow. She is a former President of the Rocky Mountain Planetarium Association (1987-1989) and served as its first Newsletter Editor. She is a member of the American Astronomical Society. She was elected to membership in Kappa Tau Alpha, the national journalism honorary, in 1993.