In case you missed it, the 500th episode of Astronomy Cast is fast approaching and we at the WSH Crew are planning a weekend-long event to help celebrate this milestone with Fraser, Pamela, members of the Crew, and, of course, our loyal viewers.

All fans of Astronomy Cast are invited to join us in Edwardsville, IL, on September 15 & 16 to participate in a special weekend full of science and astronomy-related festivities, culminating in the live recording of the 500th episode of Astronomy Cast.

You’ll meet both Pamela and Fraser, along with folks from the WSH Crew and the CosmoQuest families. As an added bonus, Fraser is planning a special live Q&A episode of one of Universe Today‘s shows.

Other weekend activities are being discussed and planned, such as fluid painting of tiny planets with Pamela (small additional fee for supplies will apply), and outings to local attractions (guests are responsible for their own admission charges). Weather permitting, there will be stargazing Saturday evening. And who knows, maybe Eddie will make an appearance or two throughout the weekend!

For more information including pre-registration for the event, please go to the following page on the Astronomy Cast site:

» AC500 Weekend on AstronomyCast.com

CosmoQuest is bringing back the Learning Space online show!

We’d love for you to be a part of it. Starting May 3, we’ll be producing weekly episodes that  go over the news, and both highlight a special guest and introduce an astronomy-related product that we think our audience of astronomy lovers will like.

Our first episode back is Thursday, May 3 at 16:00 UTC, Noon Boston, 5pm London, 9am Vancouver! Our guest will be Fraser Cain, and I’ll be talking to him about how he moved from the world of startups to the world of space.

Episodes will be recorded live on # each Thursday at either Noon Eastern / 16:00 UTC (odd dates) or 9pm Eastern / 01:00 UTC Friday (even dates). They will also be archived on YouTube on our CosmoQuest channel. Our goal is to create a show where people can catch up on the news, be part of an in-depth conversation, and learn about the best products out there for learning and doing astronomy.

The Learning Space Patreon Page is also becoming active again and will start billing pledges monthly starting on June 1st. If you no longer want to support the show with Patreon, we totally understand! Please cancel your account by May 28 so that you don’t accidentally get charged.

We really hope that you will be part of this new show.

UPDATE: The migration to our new host is complete and appears to have happened seamlessly! As you poke your way around, if you find anything amiss, please let us know. If you have a wshcrew.space email, we will get you the information to access your account through the webmail interface as well as the settings to update your email client via Slack direct message.

We are in the process of changing host server companies, and the process is going to be starting any day now. As a result, if you visit this website, you may experience outages due to the migration. This cannot be helped because it takes time for settings to propagate through to all the various servers out there.

ADDITIONALLY – if you have and use a wshcrew.space email address, you will have to either update your email client’s settings with new information, or go use the new host’s webmail interface. Once we have that information it will be available in out Slack, where you can also ask or direct message us if any questions should occur.

Your WSH Crew Admin Team

It’s September already and that means the Weekly Space Hangout is coming back from the summer hiatus – but this year there will be a few changes to make the show even better!

• The show will now be broadcast live on Wednesdays at 5pm PT / 8pm ET / 12am UTC

• The season premiere will be on Wednesday, September 13 at the new broadcast time

• Morgan Rhenberg, Kimberly Cartier and Paul Matt Sutter will all return as permanent co-hosts

• Guest interviews will sometimes be recorded in advance, but there will still be live guests

We realize that the changed broadcast time will be difficult for Europeans to watch the show since it will be in the middle of the night, but this was the only way to bring everyone together and it will give the North American audience a chance to watch the show live. The Weekly Space Hangout will, of course,still be available as a recording afterwards and the WSH Crew is working on a system to allow viewers to submit questions before the broadcast or a guest interview recording.

Stay tuned and watch this space for announcements! The WSH Crew Calendar and Schedule will be updated regularly and we will keep everyone informed in the Community and our Slack too.

The WSH Crew is doing another book giveaway – this time in conjunction with Dean Regas‘ joining us again on November 29th in a pre-recorded interview. Dean’s new book, “100 Things to See in the Night Sky” hits the stores on November 28th, but we are giving our viewers a chance to win one of two copies of Dean’s book! (Note: telescope not included!)

Please note that this offer has expired as of Tuesday, November 28, 2017!

To enter for a chance to win, send an email to giveaways@wshcrew.space with the Subject ‘100 Things’. Be sure to include your name and email address in the body of your message so that we can contact our winners afterward.

To be eligible, your entry must be postmarked no later than 11:59:59 PM EST on Monday, November 27, 2017. Two winners will be selected at random from all eligible entries live on the show, by Fraser, on Wednesday, November 29th. No purchase is necessary. You do not need to be watching the show live to win. Contest is open to all viewers worldwide. Limit: One entry per person – duplicate entries will be ignored.

On a side note, THIS awesomeness based on Dean’s FIRST book is now also available:
» 365 Facts from Space! 2018 Daily Calendar

In the last couple of months, we have been trying out a new way of communication behind the scenes of the WSH Crew with Slack, a very powerful messaging and collaboration tool in the style of an IRC chat. Because a moderated Slack channel will be shown on screen in the Weekly Space Hangout and Astronomy Cast from now on, we would now like to invite all community members to the WSH Slack.

Joining the Slack is easy! Just write an email to slack@wsh-crew.net to receive an invitation with all further details. We will vet each applicant to avoid spammers and trolls and for this reason we would like to ask everyone to include the Google+ profile you have joined the community with in your request. Once you have joined, you will have access to the WSH Slack, which not only has the live chat channels for the WSH and Astronomy Cast, but also a general area, a guest suggestion corner, an off-topic channel just for chatting and we may even create more channels as we go along. The same house rules as in the community also apply in the Slack chat. 

The WSH Slack is not meant to replace our Google+ Community – it is simply an alternate, faster way to communicate with each other and to support the hangouts and projects the WSH Crew is affiliated with. So don’t worry, we will not close down our primary home and will continue to post all the space news, information about the hangouts and more in the Google+ Community!

If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us in the community or via email.

A while ago, we mentioned that we here at the Crew had a few things up our sleeves… for example, as many of you know, we just finished up a very cool giveaway of the new book “Exoplanets” to two of our viewers (congratulations again to Raza Siddiqui and Vicki Knoer!)

Well, it’s time to announce the NEXT one of our awesome projects – at least WE think it is pretty awesome…

To remind everyone, CosmoQuest/Astronomy Cast is one of our sister organizations, and they rely on the financial generosity of viewers who are able to help out in any way. As a way to help supplement viewer donations, give our members/viewers a chance to get some swag, and to hopefully have a little fun along the way, the WSH Crew is pleased to announce that in the next few days we will be launching WSH Crew Auctions. Initially we will be offering some CQX swag (and maybe one or two other non-swag items) for folks to bid on with ALL winning bids/proceeds going directly to CosmoQuest via their Patreon Portal via PayPal.

For the time being, the intent is for the auctions to be open to bidders world-wide, and to charge no shipping fees either. However, depending how things go and what the specific item/destination is, we may modify this policy on an item-by-item basis – changes will be mentioned in each auction should this be necessary.

For now, we are also limiting selling to one account to simplify matters on all levels. If anyone wants to donate an item, let us know and we will figure out the semantics of how to do so.

Finally – this is NOT going to be a publicly accessible system. Bidders MUST be either a member of the WSH Crew Google+ community or a Slack member. This is non-negotiable. We are doing this completely on a volunteer basis and for a bit of community fun while hopefully helping out CosmoQuest.

I hope everyone is as excited about this as we are. We hope to be live with our first auction early next week. For now, if you have any questions, just ask away.

Going forward here, we will be announcing the start of each new auction – and auction winners – over in the #swag Slack channel, so if you are interested, be sure to subscribe to it!

On Friday, May 5, 2017, the WSH again welcomes Mathew Anderson, author of Our Cosmic Story, to the show. You may recall that Mathew joined us last fall just prior to the release of Our Cosmic Story and he was kind enough to offer our viewers free electronic copies just for the asking. Since then, Mathew has expanded the last chapter of his book to include additional information about SETI, and with the recent exoplanet discoveries, many of the other chapters are of even greater relevance.

We are pleased to announce that, as part of Mathew’s return visit, for a limited time, Is Anybody Out There?: An Expanded Excerpt from Our Cosmic Story is available for free – simply visit its Amazon Site to get your copy.

For those viewers who would like a copy of the complete book, Mathew is again kindly offering our viewers a free, updated electronic copy of it. Between now and Noon EST on Tuesday, May 9, 2017, send an email to ourcosmicstory@gmail.com to request a copy. Be sure to mention that you saw this on the Weekly Space Hangout.

Please note that this offer has expired as of Noon EST on Tuesday, May 9, 2017.

On Friday, May 12, the WSH will welcome authors Michael Summers and James Trefil to the show to discuss their new book, Exoplanets: Diamond Worlds, Super Earths, Pulsar Planets and the New Search for Life Beyond Our Solar System. In anticipation of their appearance, the WSH Crew is pleased to offer our viewers a chance to win one of two hard cover copies of Exoplanets. Two winners will be drawn live by Fraser Cain during our show on May 12th.

To learn more about Michael and James visit their respective websites:
» Mike Summers
» James Trefil

To read more about their book visit the Smithsonian Books Site.

To enter for a chance to win a copy of Exoplanets, send an email to:

giveaways@wshcrew.space

with the subject Exoplanets. Be sure to include your name and email address in the body of your message so that we can contact the winners afterwards.

All entries must be electronically postmarked by 23:59 EST on May 10, 2017, in order to be eligible.

No purchase necessary. Two winners will be selected at random from all eligible entries.

Good luck!

Please note that this offer has expired on 23:59 EST on May 10, 2017, 23:59 EST. The two winners will be drawn live on the Weekly Space Hangout on May 12th!

It’s Spring and we’ve done a minor overhaul of the website with some changes and additions:

• Completely new Journalist and Guest index pages, with lots of links and other information.

• The old Journalist overview from the Links page is superseded by the new Journalist Index.

• There’s a new Hangout Central page which now has the links to all Hangout-related subpages.

• The HANGOUTS button in the main menu now goes to Hangout Central, where all links are available. The legacy address www.wsh-crew.net/hangouts will still point to the current schedule index.

• The CALENDAR link has been replaced by a COMMUNITY link in the main menu. The calendar page is still accessible over Hangout Central and the  legacy short addresses www.wsh-crew.net/calendar and bit.ly/wshcalendar.

• The Beginner’s Guide to Watching G+ Hangouts on Air has been taken offline because things have changed so much with the switch to the Youtube Livestream format that it was not relevant anymore.

• The main page subtitle now reads WEB PORTAL instead of SUPPORT PAGE.

That’s all – we hope everybody likes the improvements and we always welcome comments, suggestions and even bug reports over in our community! Please note that some of the internal files of the website has changed and if you see something weird, reload the webpace and/or clear your cache because there might be an outdated CSS file in your browser.