A question about astronomer group size.

Would anyone know or would there be a way to estimate (educated guess) the current number of ‘amateur astromomers‘ in Ireland?

That in its self probably prompts other questions but I can only start there.

(I realize that these posts may irritate but I assume that unlike a list you don‘t see all the follow up unless you are interested.)

Thanks

JMP

Perhpas the number of members per club? Though of course the numbers from one 'club' would have to be doctored... You'd also need to account for amateurs not in clubs.

For a start, KAS has 19 members.

HTH

Dave

Would anyone know or would there be a way to estimate (educated guess) the current number of ‘amateur astromomers‘ in Ireland?

I don't have a handle on how many each IFAS club has. If KAS was typical with 20 members that would be a total of 300 for the 15 IFAS clubs. KAS (at the moment since its fairly new!) is probably one of the smallest clubs. So 300 would be a lower bound.

Some clubs memberships is, I imagine, in the hundreds so a more realistic guess of IFAS club membership is probably around 1000.

Add to that the people who are registered and read the forum but are not members of any club. And those who subscribe to Terrys emails but are not in clubs.

That brings us to probably 1500.

A lot of A&S subscribers are in other clubs also so we can assume they have say 1000 unique subscribers[1].

So thats 2500 who have enough interest in astronomy to join a website, club, magazine...

I guess if you count people who would turn up at a public observing session etc. then you can probably at least triple that number.

Again thats just guesswork off the top of my head. I've no idea what the various groups memberships is, and I don't really care to know!

Cheers,
~Al

[1] I neither know nor care what the A&S numbers are or how they are measured! I'm just picking numbers out of the air there

I've no idea what the various groups memberships is, and I don't really care to know!

Presumably you're not including the IFAS affiliates in that statement. As chairman of IFAS I know you have a personal, deep and genuine care for all of here in Kildare.

Cheers

Dave

Perhaps a different tack to take would be to take a large number of pseudo random people and see how many of that are in a club. Lets take the student population of NUI Maynooth, about 6,000 and realise that 120 of those are in the NUIM Astronomy club. That means that about 2% of people in NUIM are interested enough in Astronomy to join their local Astronomy club. Multiply that up to our 4,000,000 population and you get 80,000.

This seems a rather large over-estimate, I guess that conclusion is that Maynooth students are not typical!

Anyhow, you can take 80,000 as an upper bound and Al's figure as a lower!

Bart.

Bart - Students are a biased sample. They have TONS of time on their hands, as you well know

Cheers

Dave