Hi all

It's with great pleasure I can report that IceInSpace has passed another mildly significant milestone -

We passed 9,000 registered forum members!

While not a huge deal in the scheme of things, it's significant in that it shows the consistent growth of IceInSpace - which shows we're doing something right.

It was only in September 2010 that we passed the 8,000 member milestone - so we've achieved another 1000 members in only 7.5 months!

You can visit our forum here, and register for your own forum account here. It's completely free and only takes 30 seconds.

We're also growing our Facebook presence, with our IceInSpace Facebook page now having over 1,370 'Likes' and growing fast. It's easy to share with your friends - simply post a Link to our Facebook page, or click the 'Share' button in the bottom left of the Facebook page.

As a bit of a treat, here's a graph showing the rate of growth of our forum membership. The left axis shows the number of new members in that month, while the right axis shows the total number of members.

 Click the image for a larger version.

It's important to note that these membership numbers do not include spammers, banned users, or users who have not activated their account. 

The interesting spikes in January 2007 and August 2007 are due to two fantastic celestial events - Comet McNaught and the Total Lunar Eclipse. Whenever a celestial event gets some major media publicity, our IceInSpace visitor numbers and membership numbers spike accordingly.

We love to acknowledge these milestones and see them as a great opportunity to celebrate and recognise our fantastic community. We wouldn't be here without you and it's only thanks to you that we have a place that's worth coming back to, day after day, week after week, and the enormous wealth of information on the site and in the forums is thanks to your contributions.

It's also rewarding to know that every day we're helping newcomers into the hobby and helping people discover the wonders of our fabulous hobby of Astronomy.

Here's to the next 1000 members - 10,000 will be a big one!

- Mike Salway and Terry Mohan