Just how big was that crowd at Glenn Beck's rally?

It's safe to say a lot of people turned out for Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally on the national mall in Washington D.C.

Glenn Beck says half a million were in attendance. CBS says between 78,000 and 96,000. Other media outlets aren't even trying to guess.

According to a Yahoo! blog:

CBS commissioned an estimate from AirPhotosLive, a company that provides crowd sizes based on aerial photos. CBS noted that there's a margin of error of plus or minus 9,000. So, by this estimate, there were as few as 78,000 attendees or as many as 96,000.

But the final number is expected to be significantly higher than the low estimate of 78,000.

At one point, Beck told the audience that 300,000 was the estimated attendance.

Without official estimates, any numbers published by reputable news organizations — like the 300,000 estimate — quickly got picked up and repeated enough to almost become fact. Domenico Montanaro, an NBC News off-air political reporter, tweeted Saturday that a Parks Service official said there were probably 300,000 to 325,000 in attendance (even though the Parks Service wasn't officially counting). The New York Times cited NBC News' estimate of 300,000, and the Drudge Report amplified the tally even more.

The rally drew criticism from civil rights leaders as it was held on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's famous "I Have A Dream" speech.

But the event largely kept free of overt political references, as Beck (a longtime scourge of the Obama White House) had pledged it would. It stressed religious themes, together with celebrations of noncontroversial virtues such as charity and national service.

The National Park Service does not do provide crowd estimates. It stopped doing so in 1197 after it was criticized for undercounting the size of the Million Man March.

Watch AP's video report on the rally.