By Andy Vuong

As a child, Carolyn Collins Petersen ('96 MA) played adventure games with her siblings just like any other kid. However, unlike most kids, she wrote the storylines for the games that they played.

"I think I was interested in being a writer ever since I could pick up a pencil and write," said Petersen, an award-winning science writer.

However, her passion for science started earlier than her interest in writing. Her father introduced her to astronomy when she was 4.

Petersen, 45, is the editor of books and products for Sky Publishing Corp. of Cambridge, Mass., and the editor-in-chief of SkyWatch Magazine, the company's guide to space exploration.

Petersen earned her bachelor of science degree in education in 1978 and master's in journalism in 1996, both from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

After she got the education degree, Petersen spent some time working at Boulder High School, then began science writing on a free-lance basis.
"One thing led to another, and I ended up at The Denver Post, at first as an editorial assistant, and then I worked my way into doing reporting assignments," she said. "I wrote about science, but I also did the standard stuff like covering city council meetings and library board meetings for various towns in the Denver metro area."

Petersen said she "got hooked on science reporting" when she covered the Voyager 2 encounter with Saturn in August 1981.

"It was the first science event they ever sent me to cover," Peterson said. "It was part of the late-'70s, early '80s exploration of the outer solar system --- really the first time that scientists had had an up-close look at Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus."

In 1988 she decided to further her studies in astronomy and planetary science.
"I took a lot of science courses to catch up," Petersen said.

"However, when it came time to make the application for grad school, I did a lot of soul-searching and sought advice from my co-author and others. The outcome of that process was the decision that I'd be happier pursuing the master's in journalism, with an emphasis on science.

"One of the reasons for this soul-searching was that I had indeed been making money as a science writer, and it was sort of a second nature thing for me to do Ð and it was like the old commercial, 'Wow, I shoulda had a V8!' It was staring me in the face that I could combine two things I liked -- science and writing -- into my graduate studies."

While in school, she worked as a comet researcher for International Halley Watch and the Ulysses Comet Watch. She spent several years working on a project called "The Comet Halley Atlas of Large-Scale Phenomena," with Jack Brandt of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at CU. She was a member of the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph team.
The atlas was published in 1992.

"It is the most complete 'diary' of images of comet Halley, and the work has been instrumental to scientists who are studying the action of comet plasma tails in solar wind," Petersen said.

After she received her master's degree, Petersen began working at Sky Publishing in January 1997, where she had been a free-lance writer for many years."

Petersen, who lives in Groton, Mass., is also the vice president and chief scriptwriter for Loch Ness Productions, a supplier of planetarium materials. Loch Ness, a company started by her husband, Mark, in 1977, provides programming, slides, space music and other items for use in science centers and planetarium theaters.

Petersen was introduced to that world at CU's Fiske Planetarium. She has written 24 show scripts that have appeared in more than 500 planetariums around the world.

"Planetarium writing is a large part of my life," Petersen said. "It's a unique medium, and one that only a few of us have really mastered."

In 1992, Petersen and her husband created a video of one of their planetarium shows called "Hubble: Report from Orbit." They entered the video into a European science competition and won the grand prize.

In the same year, Petersen also won the grand prize in the Griffith Observatory/Hughes Corp. science writing competition for a story she wrote, "Magellan at Venus."

Her best-known work is "Hubble Vision," a book about the Hubble Space Telescope that she co-authored with Brandt, published by Cambridge University Press and now in a second printing.

SkyWatch Magazine is available online at skypub.com, Sky Publishing's Web site.