The "R" word — Big News from Loch Ness Productions

"All things must pass." — George Harrison

The big news:

Effective 30 June 2025, we're closing down the customer-facing side of Loch Ness Productions. After 48 years in the dome trade, Mark and Carolyn Collins Petersen have decided it's time to retire. We're both in our 70s now, and looking forward to some relaxation in the remaining years we have ahead of us.

So how does this affect you?

Until 30 June, we will continue with business as usual. The clock is ticking, however, so send those purchase orders soon!

After that, LNP shows will continue to be available from the reseller partners listed on our website. We just won't be handling those orders ourselves any more.

Licenses will remain valid for LNP shows that you may have.

We thank you for helping share our explorations of the universe with your audiences. Our shows have played in hundreds of domes worldwide, and reached millions of people. And from our part of the show distribution business, we've provided our producer partners more than a million dollars in show license sales income. Yay!

What about FULLDOME OnDemand?

We will be turning over the operation of FULLDOME OnDemand to the good folks at ePlanetarium. They have been with us since nearly the beginning, and already have the second-largest number of shows on our streaming service (from the Houston Museum of Natural Science). They regularly recommend FULLDOME OnDemand to their Discovery Dome customers, for both the fisheye and spherical mirror systems they sell. With Web programmers and office staff on hand, they are the natural choice for keeping FULLDOME OnDemand running.

Since we began FULLDOME OnDemand in 2015, we have streamed thousands of shows to hundreds of domes around the world. And we've provided our producer partners more than $120,000 (and counting) from show rental fees, creating a new income stream that didn't exist before we started it. More Yay!

Back to the future:

After 1 July, Loch Ness Productions will transition to become a holding company for receiving the income and royalties from our intellectual properties — our planetarium shows, Mark's music, and Carolyn's writing. While our copyrights won't expire until 70 years after we do, in this digital age, our works may live on practically "forever".

In essence, we're returning to our roots — music for Mark and writing for Carolyn. To read more about our decision, see our blog post.

We thank you for your years of supporting our endeavors, and wish you prosperity for the future. We hope you'll do the same for us!

We've made a perhaps long-overdue edit to the soundtrack of The Cowboy Astronomer.

We've removed the words about "the SpaceLab that goes up on the shuttle" -- since we haven't had either of those for 12+ years.

And we've removed the lines about people maybe had "heard the Hubble Space Telescope was broken". Back in 1993 when we produced the show, that was indeed the public's perception, before the first Servicing Mission installed COSTAR to fix the spherical aberration of the primary mirror. But now, 30+ years later, most people know how wonderfully Hubble has performed; nobody thinks it's "broken" any more.

People continue to run "The Cowboy Astronomer", and stream it on FULLDOME OnDemand. Hopefully, it will continue its popularity for years to come.

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

Mark C. Petersen, webmaster