Category Archives: space music

geodesium, Loch Ness Productions, space music

Space Music Takes You Places in the Cosmos

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Come Along for the Ride

Astute readers of this blog may recall that I’m married to one of the premier space music composers on the planet. No, really, it’s true. Working under the nom-de-plume Geodesium, Mark C. Petersen (also my business partner at Loch Ness Productions), has been composing planetarium space music for more than 35 years and he’s built up quite a specialized fan base for his music.

cover for Geodesium 11th album: Arcturian Archives
The 11th in a series of well-respected Geodesium albums.

Yesterday, 11/11/11 was more than numerological curiosity. It marked the day we released his 11th album of space music, called Arcturian Archives. It’s really an aural journey through a fascinating period in our lives and in planetarium technological history. In 1980s and 1990s, Mark created custom Geodesium music for some special planetarium shows — part system demo and part cosmic journey. The resulting soundtracks influenced his musical stylings in seminal ways, cementing in the minds of many his place as one of the top space music composers for domed theater shows.

This album captures the musical tenor of those times. Beginning in the 1980s, planetarium hardware companies were creating new ways to present content on the dome, and in the keyboard world, new digital synthesizers were coming out that had many musicians (Mark included) panting to get their hands on them.  The result of these technological changes shows up in this music.

Many of these tracks have never been heard before, outside of the few planetarium performances for which they were commissioned. And, here are three elaborate renditions of popular orchestral works:  Pachelbel’s Kanon in D, Resphigi’s Pines of the Appian Way, and (to my mind) a driven and thrilling version of Holst’s “Mars, the Bringer of War” from The Planets.

Aside from being Mark’s chief critic (and believe me, he returns the favor when I need somebody to give my writing a critical eye), I also wrote up his album liner notes and talked with him at great length in a piece called “Interview with the Artist” that is featured on the album’s Web page.  Some of the music accompanied some of the first “outside” planetarium show scripts I wrote for clients such as the St. Louis Science Center (mentioned prominently in Mark’s interview).  At the time, I had yet to go back to grad school, and I was working my way from science writing for newspapers to creating touching and engaging shows for the domed theater. And, Mark has always been right there, providing the soundtrack for my—and other people’s—flights of exploration into the cosmos. So, it’s my turn to give him the recognition he deserves for his music and his services to the domed theater community over the years. I look forward to more albums and more great shows!

If you’re interested in buying the album, check out our Website at Loch Ness Productions. It’s also available through the usual places: Amazon.com, iTunes, CDBaby, and other sources. You can preview the music below.

geodesium, planetary nebulae, space imagery, space music, star death, supernova

A Haunting Gallery of Destruction

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The Deaths of Stars

This HST mosaic image of the Crab Nebula shows a six-light-year-wide expanding remnant of a supernova explosion. Courtesy STScI.

Stardeath produces some of the most intricate-looking objects in astronomy. If you have ever gone to the Hubble Space Telescope’s Web site and searched for planetary nebulae, you know what I mean. Giant stars produce giant explosions, like the long-known Crab Nebula.

The Eskimo Nebula (NGC 2392). The intricate "face" is a bubble of material being blown into space by the central star's intense "wind". Courtesy STScI.

This Hubble Space Telescope image shows us what the supernova remnant is made of (hydrogen gas, particles of heavier elements), and also shows us the structure of the nebula and how it’s influenced by the neutron star at the center. That neutron star is what’s left of the original star — a dense object spinning more than 30 times per second.

Stars like the Sun go a bit less violently, huffing off their atmospheres for millions of years before collapsing to make white dwarfs. The radiation from the central star continues to light up the remains of the former star, creating complicated visions of stellar death. The Eskimo Nebula (right), is a fine example of such a sun-like star’s death. The remains are called a planetary nebula, one of those odd misnomers in astronomy that has nothing to do with a planet, but is a nebula. This sunlike star began to die some 10,000 years ago, blowing bubbles of gas out away from itself and flinging its outer atmosphere to space. Our own Sun might look like this some billions of years from now.

Well, I’ve been long fascinated with the images of star death, ever since I wrote my first book (with Jack Brandt), about Hubble Space Telescope science (called Hubble Vision).  A few years ago when I did an update of one of my more-popular planetarium shows, called Hubble Vision 2, I had a great selection of star death images to choose from to tell the story of stellar demise. I wrote about sun-like stars, “Hubble’s images of these stars in their death throes comprise a haunting gallery of destruction.”

As is always the case with my shows, I knew that the soundtrack artist (who also happens to be my husband and co-producer) would find a way to make the scene  memorable with his trademark space music and video choreography. The scene in the show is a solemn, beautiful procession of planetary nebula images that bring home to audiences the majesty of a star’s passing.

Fast-forward a few years to this month, and Mark has now released the music from that show soundtrack in an album called Geodesium Stella Novus (where you can preview and buy the album if you’re interested). And, he created a music video based on that planetary nebula scene that really does bring home the majesty of that haunting gallery of destruction we first introduced in the show. We created a fulldome version of the music video, which you might get to see someday at your local digital planetarium.

But, we’ve also got a “flat-screen” version available on our Youtube channel for people to watch and I’ve embedded it below.  The piece of music is called “Light Echoes”, and it accompanies these gorgeous views of star death, ranging from supernova remnants to planetary nebula, as cosmic art.  It’s not a new concept — the universe as art. But, you have to admit, when you see the way nature has arranged the aftermath of stardeath, it can look evocative, haunting… and artistic!