A question about astronomer group size.

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.

"Pseudo random people" .... thats good.... It puts me in mind of the joke about the physist who claimed he could quadruple the milk output of a herd of cows. When asked to explain he began "Consider a spherical cow......."

.......actually Im sure there is a thread here for astronomical humour.

JMP

good one Jared :lol:

Maybe we could just claim that we have the highest number of members per head of population in the known universe.

And they are real, valid ones at that!

I can tell you that last month A&S sent magazines to 3531 individual subscribers. But you could ask does someone who buys a magazine count as an amateur astronomer? I say no. My criteria would be to define an amateur astronomer as someone who observes the heavens on a REGULAR basis.

How could you ever estimate that number, however one thing is clear to me that in Ireland we do seem to have a much bigger interest in astronomy than other countries.

:lol: Reminds me about the one about the Japanese geneticists who are trying to create a breed of more 'rectangular' shaped cows so they can stack their frozen carcases more efficiently into transport containers.

Dave Grennan wrote:

How could you ever estimate that number, however one thing is clear to me that in Ireland we do seem to have a much bigger interest in astronomy than other countries.

Kind of strange considering the weather we get. Especially now.