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Carolyn Collins Petersen is Vice-President of Loch Ness Productions.

She 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, Florida. 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, and was honored to lead workshops for students and teachers three times at the University of Massachusetts annual Women in Science and Engineering Day.

Carolyn's current projects include: Red Planet Rovers a fulldome video planetarium show about Mars; a 9-part vodcast series titled Space Weather FX for a NASA-funded Loch Ness Productions-MIT Haystack Observatory project, as well as a 10-minute video program about the Murchison Widefield Array. In addition, she is writing and narrating a series of scripts for animations included with Seeker and TheSky, astronomy software programs created and produced by Software Bisque.

Carolyn also 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 2008, Carolyn worked with Cinnabar California, to write a climate change exhibit for the California Academy of Sciences. In 2005 and 2006, she worked as the senior science writer for the Griffith Observatory exhibits program, in conjunction with the Friends of the Observatory and New York City-based exhibit designers C&G Partners.

Carolyn is an accomplished public speaker, and has presented astronomy and space talks to audiences in the U.S., Canada, and South America. She has made presentations on planetarium outreach at several symposia, including the semi-annual Communicating Astronomy to the Public meeetings held in Germany and Athens in 2005 and 2007 respectively, as well as the 2006 International Planetarium Society conference in Australia.

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 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 Dr. 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 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's published articles have appeared in The Radcliffe Quarterly, as well as Sky & Telescope, SkyWatch, Astronomy, and StarDate magazines. In addition, her work has been showcased in MIT's TechTalk. 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 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. While on IPS Council, she spearheaded a major redesign and redirection of The Planetarian, and worked to produce several guidebooks written by planetarium professionals. 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, as well as the National Association of Science Writers and holds a membership in the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Carolyn was elected to membership in Kappa Tau Alpha, the national journalism honorary, in 1993.