Quick update: The amazing Hangoutathon is over now and the donations goal of $36000 was achieved!
The CosmoQuest 2015 Hangoutathon Fundraiser starts on Saturday – see my previous post for more information! Here are the five event pages plus a playlist with the Youtube streams from which the mega-hangout will be broadcast in succession – the times will appear in your local timezone on the event pages:
• Part 1: Saturday, April 25th – 15:00-23:00 UTC
• Part 2: Saturday, April 25th – 23:00 – Sunday, April 26th – 07:00 UTC
• Part 3: Sunday, April 26th – 07:00-15:00 UTC
• Part 4: Sunday, April 26th – 15:00-23:00 UTC
• Part 5: Sunday, April 26th – 23:00 UTC – Monday, April 27th – 03:00 UTC
• Youtube Playlist with all five broadcast streams for direct viewing e.g. on mobile devices
The schedule is now available on the main Hangoutathon page as a Google Sheet document and you can follow CosmoQuest director and Hangoutathon moderator Pamela Gay on Twitter for the latest updates. There will be a lot of amazing events and guests, some of which have already appeared in the previous two fundraisers and some who have been newly recruited. This year, CosmoQuest is also teaming up with Astronomers without Borders to celebrate the 2015 Global Star Party, so there will be stargazing if the weather permits where it’s dark in the world and many other astronomy-related events!
You can also participate and ask questions in all the usual ways like the event pages, the Q&A and on all the social media channels – you can follow CosmoQuest on Google+, Twitter and Facebook to keep up with what’s happening. I will be part of the team monitoring social media, the event pages and Q&A, answering questions, steering people in the right directions and generally keeping an eye on things, so you will definitively see me around.
And I will close this post with a variation of what I wrote in the last two years: While the Hangoutathon is not a pay-per-view broascast 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 not be able to give very much myself, but if you are in a situation that does not allow you to make donations, you can still spread the word and do citizen science for CosmoQuest yourself.