Posted on behalf of the Uwingu team; Astronomy magazine is a proud partner of this effort to raise funding for space science
At Uwingu, we want to find new ways to connect people to space and the sky, and to use that interest to fuel a new way to fund space research and space education.
Back in the late summer and fall, we raised $80,000 via a crowd-funding campaign at IndieGoGo; after we completed that campaign, we learned we were one of IndieGoGo’s 25 biggest success stories in 44,000+ campaigns!
We used the funds from that campaign to complete and launch our first project, which revolves around everyday people nominating names to someday be used for the 160 billion planets estimated to inhabit our galaxy. We launched that project in beta test last month, and just exited beta in time for the holidays!
Head over to www.uwingu.com to check out some of the creative name nominations — even the editors and staff at Astronomy magazine have gotten in the game! While you’re there, you can nominate your own favorite names or vote for the ones already in the database that you like best. And you can nominate names for your friends, co-workers, hometown, favorite sports team, just about anything, and then others can vote on these to help us determine what is most popular.
You can also give Uwingu gift certificates — a new capability we just installed! And proceeds from these also go to funding space research and education.
We hope you’ll enjoy this and enjoy helping create this new funding stream in these uncertain times for NASA and the National Science Foundation. And if you would, tell your friends via Twitter, Facebook, and email — we think that readers of Astronomy can help get the word out even better than we can!