Losing the Dark

Losing the Dark - a Short Public Service Announcement on Light Pollution

Available as a FREE Download!

Update: We have translated the show into French, German, Hindi, Korean, Polish, Russian, and Spanish.

IDA and Loch Ness Productions are proud to present Losing the Dark, a public service announcement about the problems and solutions of Light Pollution.

Starry skies are a vanishing treasure because light pollution is washing away our view of the cosmos. It not only threatens astronomy, it disrupts wildlife, and affects human health. The yellow glows over cities and towns — seen so clearly from space — are testament to the billions spent in wasted energy from lighting up the sky.

Losing the Dark is a "public service announcement" planetarium show, a collaboration of Loch Ness Productions and the International Dark-Sky Association. It introduces and illustrates some of the issues regarding light pollution, and suggests three simple actions people can take to help mitigate it. The show gives planetarium professionals a tool to help educate the public about the problems of light pollution. Planetarians are uniquely positioned to teach audiences ways we can all work together to implement responsible use of lighting.

Losing the Dark has no license fee! The show has been rendered in many formats and languages — just go to the fulldome or flat screen downloads page.

If downloading is not a viable option (for example, the movie files are too big for efficient downloading, and for theaters requiring frames to encode or slice their own movies), Loch Ness can ship the fulldome show on a USB drive. There is a minimal cost for this, outlined on the Prices / Ordering page. The show is also available directly from selected fulldome vendors whose systems use proprietary encoding.

In addition to the fulldome version for digital planetarium use, we have rendered Losing the Dark as a conventional flat screen video. It's available on YouTube in English, French, German, Hindi, Korean, Polish Russian, and Spanish (with more languages coming soon) for online viewing, sharing and embedding on blogs and Web pages. It can also be downloaded, for use in classrooms, kiosks, museum theaters, and advocate multimedia presentations. Classic planetarium theaters without fulldome capability can show this version using their traditional video projectors.

Loch Ness Productions and the International Dark-Sky Association are pleased and proud to make Losing the Dark available to planetarium theaters, educators, and viewers around the world!

If we all work together, we can bring back the dark of night to planet Earth.

Production of Losing the Dark was made possible by a donations from:

the Fred Maytag Family Foundation