© Marek Uliasz | Dreamstime.com

When we launched CosmoQuest almost a year ago, I never thought that the question I would be asked most often would be, “How is CosmoQuest funded?” Given the current crunch on funding for science, I shouldn’t be surprised, but …

CosmoQuest isn’t just one organization: it’s a multi-institutional collaboration, and each institution relies on a variety of funding streams to keep their programs thriving. Our biggest programs are the suite of citizen science projects so many of you participate in, our numerous Google Hangouts (including the Virtual Star Parties), the Forums, and all our educational programs. The truth is, a lot of this is funded through donations, and as we approach the end of the year, I’d like to take a moment to explain how you can help keep all the things we do growing and thriving.

Citizen Science: Design and implementation of our citizen science projects is funded through the missions they work with via grants and contracts managed through Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Our team scientists all have their own funding that they’ve fought to get through grants, fellowships, and other competitive projects. Moving into the future, we’d like to grow our softwares capabilities to allow mobile device support, and to add more gamification through badges and challenges. I’ll be continuing to write grants to do this, but your donations would help. You can donate (Tax deductible in the USA as laws allow) using Paypal through SIUE.

The Forum: During the summer, CosmoQuest merged with the BAUT forums. This caused: a huge surge in traffic, which was welcome; a huge surge in server costs, which wasn’t anticipated; and a surprising amount of work, which was surprising. Astrosphere New Media Association stepped forward and has been struggling to cover all the server expenses, and they hired Scott Lewis to spend a couple hours each week coordinating the site, and making sure all of its software and community needs were addressed. Due to the unexpected size of the server costs, Astrosphere’s budget is currently ….lets just say donations are desperately needed. You can donate a variety of different ways via this page. Note: if you donate to help with server costs, we have special forum badges you can opt in for (read more on the forums).

Educational Programs: Development of all of our educational programs is funded through a NASA ROSES grant at SIUE and through an EU funded collaboration at NUCLIO with Go Labs. This allows us to create classroom materials that allow kids around the world to use real data to explore our solar system while learning through research tested, hands-on activities. Through these to programs, we will be doing teacher professional development workshops through Google Hangouts on Air and throughout the US and EU. We will also be working to engage the public at numerous events, such as Dragon*Con. While development of our programs is fully funded, we are always looking for donations to cover printing costs and to help us travel to more events were we can provide face to face learning opportunities. If you would like to help, please consider donating to through either the Citizen Science team at SIUE or NUCLIO.

Google Hangouts on Air / 365 Days of Astronomy: This is where collaboration plays it’s largest role! As we move into 2013, we will be launching more and more shows through more and more partners. In general, Astrosphere New Media provides staffing to organize our calendar of events, production of the 365 Days of Astronomy Audio feed, and makes sure all shows appear in a coordinated way on YouTube, but almost all other effort is provided by individuals and organizations. Astrosphere is always looking for sponsors to support daily production costs.

• Virtual Star Parties: These are done entirely as a volunteer effort! We would love to get donations of cameras that would allow us to engage more telescopes around the world.
• Astronomy Cast: Fraser and I donate all our time to the production of Astronomy Cast, but we do pay a few good people (and students) to edit the show (Thanks, Preston!), generate show notes, create transcripts, and maintain our feeds. This is funded entirely through donations managed through SIUE and Astrosphere.
• NASA related shows and special events: These highly watched shows are generated using NASA funded staff time, and through volunteer efforts on the part many of the scientists and the production team.
• Wednesday Education Hangouts (starting in January): This new program will be produced through NASA funded staff time at SIUE and through the volunteer efforts of the many participating education experts.
• Planetary Society Hangouts: These Thursday explorations of all that’s new in Planetary science and exploration are made possible through contributions made to the a Planetary Society.
• all other shows are volunteer efforts! If you like what you see, please give generously to the individual websites of the producers!

I think this covers the bulk of our activities, but I do want to give a shout out to Astronomers without Borders. We coordinate a lot of efforts with them, and it’s through mutual support that all of us thrive.

At the end of the day, everything we do is made possible by you! You make the science happen, and your donations give us the ability to produce all our media. Thank you! … And if you aren’t regularly doing science, please consider donating to one of our partner institutions.