It’s less than 24 hours until the 2014 CosmoQuest Hangoutathon begins! Are you ready? Have you already donated or do you want to? It’s starting on 5pm CEST or 11am EDT on Saturday! Click on the image to go to the event page where all the information, schedule and video links will appear and also keep an eye on the CosmoQuest page on Google+, the CosmoQuest main website and their Twitter stream, where right now an hourly tweetdown to the Hangoutathon is happening!

This just came in as I was finishing the article: Pamela Gay has recorded a short introduction about the preparations for the Hangoutathon and maybe there will be a timelapse of her attic being turned into a film studio later!

• The schedule of the Hangoutathon is available here now!

• Another video message from Pamela Gay from this morning.

Update from Sunday: The Hangoutathon is now in hour 23 and the donations are at over $17.000 – that is only $3000 away from last years end result! It’s been absolutely fascinating with lots of fun and interesting guests! It’ll be going on until 5am CEST, which means I sadly won’t be able to see the finale live, but I’ll be writing something tomorrow about it.

Update from Monday: Over $24.000 have been donated until the the end of the Hangoutathon, which is absolutely amazing! While this was still short of the $36k goal, I think it is still a rousing success for CosmoQuest and shows that there are a lot of people out there who genuinely care about the future of science and education. The show – and that’s what it really was – has been utterly amazing and it was pure joy to see the CosmoQuest folks and their friends and collaborators put on such a great effort to ensure that their project is going to survive. And they will make it! You can watch the whole Hangoutathon in this (unofficial) playlist and I’m going to make a complete index again over the course of this week. Go watch if you haven’t already and you can still donate, because the 36-hour hangoutathon has been extended into a 36-day fundraising effort! 

Update from Wednesday: The Hangoutathon Youtube Index is now ready!

I’m probably going to update this article later today and tomorrow when more details are coming. For now, here are a couple of links until the Hangoutathon begins:

• The official Youtube playlist of the 2013 Hangoutathon, split by topic

• My previous blog post with the preliminary index of the 2013 Hangoutathon

• Pamela Gay’s April 2013 post about the funding situation at CosmoQuest

• Another blog post from me about CosmoQuest’s Moon- Planet- and Asteroid-Mappers

• A collection of science & astronomy hangouts and podcasts from CosmoQuest and others

• The Journey to CosmoQuest – my 2013 article on how I found CosmoQuest and more

• Follow CosmoQuest on Google+, Twitter and Facebook!

And I will close this post with a variation of what I wrote last year: While the Hangoutathon is not a pay-per-view event and watching is free, the whole reason for this amazing event is to raise money for CosmoQuest. So if you like what they are doing and care about science and astronomy education not only in the USA but worldwide, please consider making a donation – I’m sure that even small amounts are going to help. I will unfortunately not be able to contribute money this year, but if you are in the same situation, you can always help to spread the word and, of course, do Citizen Science yourself!