Last night, something absolutely incredible happened: after 36 hours of non-stop fundraising, the CosmoQuest 2015 Hangoutathon achieved its goal and received an astounding $36,176.42 in donations – so much more than in the last two years! So thank you to all the guests and to everyone who donated, watched, tirelessy shared out all the links, promoted the Hangoutathon and also did  a lot of citizen science – you all made this a tremendous success and the CosmoQuest team very, very happy! Special thanks also goes out to the members of the WSH Crew Community (full disclosure: of which I am actually a co-founder and moderator), who actually helped to organize the Hangoutathon when Pamela Gay was too busy working on the very grant proposal which will hopefully ensure the continued survival of CosmoQuest later this year.

It was an incredible weekend full of awesome science, astronomy, public outreach and even music. Potato salad turned out to a major theme, because CosmoQuest director and Hangoutathon host Pamela Gay was legitimately outraged about the potato salad kickstarter that got $55K last year. Later, everything came to be full circle when Hangoutathon guest Geoff Notkin admitted he might have inadvertedly boosted the whole potato salad thing together with his old friend, author Neil Gaiman – but the anger against the success of potato salad compared to science turned out to be one one of the most incredible aspects of the fundraiser and will maybe result in something even more!

There were a few technical hiccups because of some major internet outages in North America, but the team sailed right through it, often thanks to the incredible guests. The whole Hangoutathon is still available in its recorded version in six parts, collected here in a Youtube Playlist, but I will also prepare a complete index matched to the schedule like I had done for the previous two fundraisers in 2013 and 2014. It will take a few days because 36 hours of video is a lot to get through, but once it’s done there will be easy access to the separate segments without having to actually cut and re-render the video thanks to the ability to put timecodes in a Youtube URL.

So thank you EVERYBODY again, stay tuned for more and keep doing citizen science on CosmoQuest.org!