Yuri's Night | The World Space Party – Connecting people with each other, their dreams and spaceship earth.

Yuri’s Night was bigger and better than ever in 2010, and the number and diversity of news outlets that covered us and our events grew accordingly. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the shows, newspapers, and websites that featured Yuri’s Night this year:

First and foremost, we’d like to extend a big thanks to Alan Boyle and Miles O’Brien. Boyle, author of MSNBC’s Cosmic Log and a big Yuri’s Night supporter, interviewed Executive Director Loretta Whitesides in another excellent Yuri’s Night post, while O’Brien, acclaimed space journalist and YN toastee, featured an extended video interview with Loretta as part of his “This Week In Space” program.

Newspapers around North America, including the Washington Post, Huntsville Times, Winnipeg Free Press, Tucson Weekly, and Orlando Sentinel, made sure to publicize their local events, as did several college newspapers, notably Jack Cackler’s great article in the Stanford Daily. We also saw some great coverage in weeklies and prominent online sources, such as CNET, San Francisco’s SF Weekly, Discovery News, and DCist.com.

What I think I love the most, though, is the sheer diversity of blogs and independent websites that featured or referenced YN2010. What other event is going to draw coverage from Students for the Exploration and Development of Outer Space, Yahoo! Finance, NASA, the GLXP’s Launch Pad blog, Rap-Up.com, Space.com, Starwars.com, MAKE Magazine, TMD Celebrity News, Daily Kos, and Justin Timberlake’s official website? Staggering.

Yuri’s Night also received some great international coverage in countries like Germany, Russia, and Japan; check out this link to read more from those sources. Did we leave any out? Post any news articles or blog posts you enjoyed reading in the comments.

So by this point, most of our Yuri’s Night events have either finished or are going on as we speak. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be wrapping up our coverage of Yuri’s Night 2010, reviewing this year’s events–as well as the more distant past of Yuri’s Night–and starting to look forward to Yuri’s Night 2011.

It came down to the wire, but at the very end, you all pulled through to make this the biggest year of Yuri’s Night yet. We had 222 registered events, breaking our old record (from last year) of 217, in 67 countries on all 7 continents. (A lot of the last-minute party entries came from the awesome folks at Yuri’s Night Iran, so make sure to give them a virtual round of applause.) As far north as Helsinki, Finland and as far south as, well, the South Pole, people of all nations, ages, races and interests came together to celebrate the achievements of humanity in space and hope for an even brighter future.

Thousands flock to Moffett Field to celebrate YN Bay Area (Credit: Ryan Coleman)

Our flagship event, YN Bay Area at NASA Ames, was a huge success, of course, with Richard Garriott accepting the first ever Spirit of Yuri’s Night award, world-class musical acts playing live throughout the evening, and NASA Ames Center Director Pete Worden showing up in yet another of his legendarily awesome costumes. But from what we’ve been hearing from people, YNBA isn’t the only one with record-breaking crowds. Early reports indicate YN Winnipeg drew 200 people, YN Ra’anana about 300, and the perennially crazy YN Reno saw over 700 attendees! This is just a sampling–we’re looking to get attendance counts from parties great and small this year, and by all indications the numbers are going to be off the charts. (Of course, events of any size are just as fantastic–from the 30 folks at YN Chicago who held a “Who Killed Yuri Gagarin?” murder mystery party to the 30 at YN Sydney who enjoyed some great beer and model rocketry, to the dozens of parties around the world with just a few people celebrating in their own way, we love to see all of you out there celebrating with us.)

YN New York event organizer Liz Kennick poses with friends as Na'vi from Avatar (Credit: Carol Pinchefsky)

Fortunately, those who didn’t have a YN event nearby were still able to participate in a variety of ways. First and foremost was the marathon webcast hosted by Spacevidcast all throughout Saturday, the 10th, where Cariann and Ben Higginbotham did a fantastic job keeping the airwaves alive and coordinating live peeks in on parties around the globe. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people were on at a time watching the live feed, which was even ustream.tv’s featured video for a while. Elsewhere, you could keep up with the party count on our Twitter feed, or join one of the several events that were happening in the Second Life virtual world over the Yuri’s Night time period.

Revelers pose for a quick pick at YN Amsterdam (Credit: Morten Arstad Foto)

We’re sure there are a lot of great Yuri’s Night stories out there that we haven’t heard a thing about yet, so we’d like your take. If you have any Yuri’s Night photos that you’d like to share (all work is protected under a Creative Commons license), please upload them on our Flickr group at http://www.flickr.com/groups/yurisnight/–and make sure to check out some particularly awesome hi-res pics collected by Discovery News. If you have any summaries of your event that you’d like to share with us, please include them in the comments to this post.

Thanks so much to all of you for helping make this the best Yuri’s Night yet!

Just in case you forgot, today is April 12, the 29th anniversary of the first Space Shuttle launch and the 49th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first human space flight. (Yes, that’s awfully close to 50–we’re already working on some huge plans for 2011.) It can be tough to get folks interested in going out and partying on a Monday night, but there are still dozens of Yuri’s Night events this year that’re being held on April 12 proper. Yuri’s Night Sydney, Vienna, Sofia, Winnipeg, Budapest, Kuwait, Amsterdam, Atlanta, Seattle, and all the others, we salute you.

We’ve had a huge rush of registered events this weekend; we’re up to 211 parties in 67 countries. We’ve already shattered our “most countries” record, and we’re so close to breaking the overall event record of 217 we set last year–so if you’re hosting an event you haven’t registered yet, please let us know!

We’ll be posting a series of wrapup posts over the next few days, but until then, thanks for celebrating Yuri’s Night with us and keep Rocking The Planet!

(Incidentally, this is the 100th post on our new Yuri’s Night blog, which I believe we started in the middle of Yuri’s Night 2009. Thanks for reading, everyone!)