Helo everybody, please bear with me and my English, because there's no way I would write such a long message in Finnish :)
I want to tell you about a project I've been working on for the past year: an image hosting service specifically made for astrophotographers, called AstroBin.
AstroBin, which you can find at http://www.astrobin.com/ is seeking to preserve the value inherent to the great scientific-grade output that the astrophotograph community has produced for so many years.
It was born out of the desire to end something I had seen for too long, something that I didn't want to see: the waste of incredible material to the sea of chaos that the Internet can be. For years, I have seen fantastic astrophotographs being uploaded to Internet Forums, often with little or no data, or to general purpose image hosting site, invariably with no data attached.
Such an image would be seen by some people, then quickly forgotten, and reduced to nothing more than a bunch of pixel in the giant wasteland of the Internet.
I respected the Astrophotography community too much to allow this, so I decided to do something about it. AstroBin is the result: an effort to host, collect, index and categorize the output of the astrophotographers all over the world, so that their precious data would serve a purpose, and have a meaning forever.
So, let me tell you why you too should upload your astro-images to AstroBin, and contribute:
Unlimited uploads, unlimited size, for free
Astrophotography images have scientific value that shouldn't be lost in file compression. On AstroBin you can (and should!) upload full size images. And you have unlimited space for free.
Smart albums
Your astro-images will be automatically organized in dynamic and intelligent albums: by subject type (nebulae, clusters, galaxies...), by year and by equipment used.
(http://www.iovene.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/AstroBin-siovene-151455.png)
Dedication to data
On a general purpose image sharing site, you would upload your image and be done with it. AstroBin, instead, has a user interface specifically designed to enable you to input all the technical data of your image. AstroBin will autocomplete your input using a vast database: everything from telescopes, CCDs and filters to astronomical objects in many catalogues will show in popup dialogs for easy selection when you start typing their names. AstroBin is connected to the SIMBAD Astronomical Database, which contains over 5 million objects under over 15 million names!
(http://www.iovene.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/AstroBin-152134.png)
Data is strongly interconnected
Have you ever wanted to see how your next image is going to look like? On AstroBin, you can search for all images of a certain target that were taken with a certain telescope and a certain CCD or camera. Or a certain filter. How about all the images between 6 and 8 hours of integration? Or with a certain Moon phase? You can do that!
(http://www.iovene.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/AstroBin-152531.png)
All the data at a glance
Each image on AstroBin is annotated of all the technical details about its acquisition. Telescopes involved, cameras, mounts, filters, everything is visible at a glance in the Technical Card. Even the Moon age at the time of the acquisition is displayed.
(http://www.iovene.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/AstroBin-North-American-Pelican-Nebula-Mosaic-antimorris-152829.png)
More than just an image
AstroBin will do more than just host a copy of your image: when you upload a photograph, a histogram and a black & white inverted version of the image will be generated on the fly, so it's easier to Spot faint nebulosity regions or spiral arms. Images will also be plate solved, and an annotated version will appear on the site. AstroBin will know what are the astronomical objects in your image without you telling!
(http://www.iovene.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/AstroBin-Markarians-Chain-astrogufo-153125.png)
AstroBin supports multiple image revisions
Don't tell me you have never gone back to revise the processing of an image after you had published it. AstroBin embraces this concept and lets you publish several revisions of the same image easily and intuitively! Now it's going to be really easy to tell whether your processing has improved.
(http://www.iovene.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/AstroBin-M31-LH-RHGB-fdc-153330.png)
AstroBin is social!
On AstroBin you can message other astrophotographer, follow them and be notified when they post new images, or perform requests for more data. You can also vote on images.
(http://www.iovene.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/AstroBin-153536.png)
Have your data neatly plotted
Data is everything, and AstroBin will give you the tools to keep your data neat and organized. And with our plots, you can get insights on your productivity and on the gear you use the most.
(http://www.iovene.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/AstroBin-siovene-153707.png)
In conclusion, as you have undoubtly realized by now, AstroBin is way more than an image hosting service. It's what the Astrophotography community has needed for a long time. Posting your astrophotographs on AstroBin not only means you gain a great place to store your work, a great way to keep your data consistent and organized and fantastic tool to accompany you in your hobby; it also means you are contributing something to the community, you are helping others know what to expect from their equipment, and you are keeping important data safe and organized.
If you are as convinced as I think you are, go ahead and sign up at http://astrobin.com/accounts/register/ !
PS: I wanted to translate the website to Finnish too, but this hasn't happened yet. I hope soon!
I hope you like AstroBin and find it useful. Please don't hesitate to let me know if you have suggestions, comments, critiques, ideas, or you need help with it!
Thank you all,
Salvatore.
Wow!!!
Count me in, what a wonderful new and fresh approach! Have you done this alone, or is there a group behind?
You don't have to tell us, how this all is financed... this can't be money laundering surely :grin:
Only thing i'm little worrying, are possible copyright problems with full size material. I have had some bad experiences about illegal usage of my pictures earlier.
Maybe kind of optional and automated "water mark" system could be good, I mean something subtle enough added to an image to prevent unauthorized usage?
Thank you for the hard work and a massive input to astro community.
J-P Metsävainio, http://astroanarchy.zenfolio.com/
Ps.
This is something, that should be published in "Tähdet & Avaruus" magazine and in Avaruus.fi news!
Generally this should have as much international attention as possible to AstroiBin to reach the "critical mass"...
Hey JP,
I'm honored beyond what words can express, to receive appreciation from you, an imager that I admire so much!
I can openly answer all your questions :)
At the moment, AstroBin is not financed, that is I'm paying for it :) I just started a month ago, and the expense is not too much, so I can justify it as "hobby money". I'm not stupid though, and I've made my calculation: while I think the site can continue as it is right now for some times, if it starts growing beyond control I will have to monetize it. I hope to delay this as much as I can, so I will think then how to monetize (pro accounts? ads? donations?). Let's see how it goes and enjoy the moment. This is something that I did out of "pure intentions", for the good of the community, so we're cool as long as I can afford it :)
The second question is if I've done this alone, and the answer is yes. 99.5% alone :) There are a couple of small things a friend did, but less than 1% for sure. I have worked nights and weekends for a year!
And finally, the watermarking is something that's been sitting in my TODO list far too long, thanks for reminding me! I'll get around to doing it soon (I guess after the holidays, because I will travel home).
Oh, and about your PS: I have thought about the press, maybe in the future I will write to some magazine :) It would be great for AstroBin to reach critical mass because more data means better searches, and more interesting things to devise.
Unfortunately the site is not translated to Finnish yet (Lauri are you reading this? ;) ), but hopefully soon. Only then, I think I can propose a press release to Tähdet & Avaruus.
Finally, let me thank you again for the interest and the encouragement, and if you have more ideas and suggestions, please let me know!
Salva.
Very impressive work Salvatore :cool: you have done lot of wok with that. I will check this closer, it looks that this could help me to organize and archive astropictures.
Thank you for your hard work!
Hey Rauno, yes indeed, that would be one strong reason to use AstroBin. It will keep your data neat and organized. That way you don't have to worry about losing data :) People have even uploaded images they had forgotten what was they were of, and used the plate-solving so AstroBin would tell them :)
Lainaus käyttäjältä: siovene - 20.12.2011, 18:32:33
Unfortunately the site is not translated to Finnish yet (Lauri are you reading this? ;) )
Yes! :grin: Let's try to get this ready ASAP.
Oh my how far it's gotten! Super useful with the semi-automatic gear, conditions and target categorization. And the site looks really nice too! I'm uploading mine as of right now :azn:
Just loaded my first image.
I am very, very impressed. I registered, logged in, selected my gear, loaded image in about four minutes. Not once did I have to stop to figure out how something is done. Probably the easiest, most intuitive piece of software that I have ever used. And could it be that even my image looks better at Astrobin :grin:
Just exellent.
Petri
Agree with Petri, this brilliant software is very easy to use. I have downloaded few of my images and this will be the place where i keep my Astropics.
I think this will become very popular place :cool:
Am I the only one who cannot see any pictures on the site?
i am little curious about the servers that run astrobin... are they crash proofed ? (two or more machines with spare raid packs ready to go instantly etc? upses for electricity breakdowns and protecting from thunders etc ?) and hope that your servers have enough crashproof/backed-up space needed for "millions" of photographs :cheesy:
it isn't fun when someone is uploading couple of million photos and all gone if your server crashes etc :grin:
Looks like it's powered by Amazon, the biggest shop in the net.
Lainaus käyttäjältä: fsol77m - 22.12.2011, 13:53:34
i am little curious about the servers that run astrobin... are they crash proofed ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_S3
"S3 is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year.[14]"
Lainaus käyttäjältä: nepa - 22.12.2011, 08:22:14
Am I the only one who cannot see any pictures on the site?
Hi. Were you the one who emailed me about this? If not, I have 3 reports about this.
I'll try to get some support from Amazon about this. It's really odd, because I've received only 3 complaints while many thousands people have seen the site, and hundreds keep returning every day.
Lainaus käyttäjältä: fsol77m - 22.12.2011, 13:53:34
i am little curious about the servers that run astrobin... are they crash proofed ? (two or more machines with spare raid packs ready to go instantly etc? upses for electricity breakdowns and protecting from thunders etc ?) and hope that your servers have enough crashproof/backed-up space needed for "millions" of photographs :cheesy:
it isn't fun when someone is uploading couple of million photos and all gone if your server crashes etc :grin:
As Lauri and Jorma said, the images are on Amazon S3. It's extremely durable, available and scalable. There will never be a problem on that side.
The actual website, instead, runs on a Linode instance, and I have daily backups.
Linode has redundant storage, so data will be safe there too. With regards to scalability, AstroBin has been designed with scalability in mind. When one instance will not be enough, I have the means to add another one, and use a load balancer in front of the instances.
It will be many years until there are millions of images though :)
One thing that comes to mind when I browsed the site.
I expected more in the line of legal stuff but all I found was this sentence
"The images on this websites are copyright of their respective owners. "
This is a good sentence itself but I think there should be privacy policy somewehere.
Lainaus käyttäjältä: einari - 04.01.2012, 12:06:31
One thing that comes to mind when I browsed the site.
I expected more in the line of legal stuff but all I found was this sentence
"The images on this websites are copyright of their respective owners. "
This is a good sentence itself but I think there should be privacy policy somewehere.
Hi!
Have you checked out the Terms of Service? http://astrobin.com/tos
Also, each picture can be given a license from the Creative Commons ones.
There's no privacy policy at the moment, because there are not many personal data that can be put in the website.
Hello everyone!
I have just rolled out an update to the website with some new features and many bug fixes.
Let's get to the business right away. These are the four main additions:
You are now able to automatically watermark your new images.
When you upload something, it will ask you whether you want to watermark it, what the text should be, its position and opacity. Don't worry, it remembers your settings, so next time you are there you just need to click on "Next" and not input everything again.
You can now specify whether the main subject of an image is a solar system body.
Planetary imagers will be happy about this: you can now explicitly and unambiguously tell what the main body of the solar system imaged in your picture is, and your smart album "by subject" will now also show your planetary work. I recommend you go back to your planetary images and select "Edit basic information" from the Actions menu, and fix the missing data.
You can filter the home page by several categories.
Namely, all deep sky, clusters, nebulae, galaxies, all solar system, Sun, Moon, planets and comets. Enjoy exploring!
You can sort images in each profile page by acquisition time.
This was definitely something that was missing before. While you could always sort the home page by acquisition time (as opposed to merely the upload time), the profile page lacked this feature. Well, it's there now!
The upload wizard now include gear and acquisition details.
You can skip them if you want, by clicking on Save and finish whenever you want, but really, why would you use AstroBin if not for the data?
There were also tons of minor bug fixing here and there, so you should also be enjoying a better user experience. I wish to give a very big Thank You to the translators, José, Jean-Charles and Laurent, who added the new content in less than 48 hours.
Thank you all for reading this and keep sharing!
Clear skies to all,
Salvatore.
Hi all!
It's with great pleasure that I announce another site update. This has been a crazy one, with an incredible amount of work happened in only 9 days!
Here are the most important new features:
THE MESSIER MARATHON
This is a page that shows all 110 Messier objects, and for each object, one is chosen from the images on AstroBin. How is an image chosen? Via a democratic process of nomination! There is a new button called "Nominate for the Messier Marathon", that lets you give your vote to an image. The image with the most votes (aka nominations), will be featured on the marathon page.
THE BIG WALL
This is a page showing 100 AstroBin images (instead of the 20 right now on the home page), that you can sort and filter at will.
Some global site data has been added to the STATS page.
There is now a little number telling you how many new notifications/messages/requests you have.
The site is now much smarter at recognizing what you type as Subjects.
There were also a lot of bug fixes and usability/design improvements. So keep uploading, and remember to nominate images for the Messier Marathon!
Hi all,
if anybody would like to help poor Lauri with the localization of AstroBin to Finnish, you can now do it at http://translate.astrobin.com/
Just sign up and start translating :) Let me know if you need help or something doesn't work well: it's the first time I use this software!
Thank you :)
I've been signed up on AstroBin since the beginning, but uploaded most of my images only yesterday: http://www.astrobin.com/users/naavis/ I also dabbled a bit with the translation, it'll hopefully get finished soon. Anyway, AstroBin seems awesome!
Hi all!
A new site update was just rolled out, including some high impact features.
Comments for the images: although I didn't initially plan this, many of you requested this feature, so here it is!
How does it work? Very simply: each image can be commented, and each comment can be replied. The comments are threaded, so it's easy to follow many conversations. This is implemented so to work really quickly: no page reloads, no previews, no clumsy interfaces to navigate about! Just a very modern and sleek interface, ability to painlessly edit comments, delete and undelete them.
Just scroll to the bottom of an image page, and add your comment, or reply to some other comment. This is integrated with AstroBin's notifications system, so you'll never miss anything!
A better workflow for locations: I must admit this was long overdue, but managing Locations now is consistent with the rest of the experience.
All you need to do is go to "Edit your profile", and add some Locations. Then in the "Edit basic information" page of each image you can easily choose among your locations, just like you do with the gear.
Data for the gear items: remember that AstroBin thrives on data, and it is the reason it exists. You can now edit additional detail for all of your gear items.
If you go to "Edit your profile" and select Gear, you will see that the pieces of gear are now in orange bubbles while you remember them being in white ones. Gear item in an orange bubble need some information, so you need to click the little edit icon (it looks like a pen) and add additional details for that gear item.
If you are thorough with the data, the whole community will benefit greatly! Once enough data is in, I will unleash some new powerful searches:
By telescope type
By telescope size
By focal length
By CCD pixel size
By filter (h-alpha, clear, narrowband in general, ...)
Just to name some!
I hope you will enjoy this new release of AstroBin!
Hi all,
I just pushed a minor update to the site. The main new features are:
You can now search by telescope aperture! Head over to the search page, expand the "Gear" section by clicking on the
- link, and use the slider to choose a range for the diameter of the telescope in millimiters.
You now have a plot for the views of each image, and also globally for your profile.
I split some views using a tabbed interface, so your profile page is not so crowded.
There were some visual improvements for better UI consistency.
I added a North/South and East/West option for the latitude and longitude of your Locations, please check that they are alright or adjust accordingly, it takes a minute!
Then I fixed a bunch of minor bugs, of course. Hopefully you will enjoy the additions.
Thanks!
Was it possible to change the feeding of observing place coordinates so that also desimal degrees were accepted.
Kaizu
Hi Kaizu, in the Location form you can input degrees, minutes and seconds. That should be precise enough :)
Lainaus käyttäjältä: siovene - 16.02.2012, 18:39:58
Hi Kaizu, in the Location form you can input degrees, minutes and seconds. That should be precise enough :)
Yes, I noticed. The question is not of precision but easiness. I just have them in decimal format and I was too lazy to transform them.
I thought that if I feed the location coordinates in decimal format to the first fields, the system automatically turns them to whatever format
it want to archive them. If I fill the minute and second fields then the system can use them as it use now.
Just a proposal.
Normally I quit the inguiries to the first setback but here the benefits made me continue.
Kaizu
Oh I see, sorry for misunderstanding. I have added an entry to my issue tracker, so eventually I will change it so it can accept input in any format.
Thanks for the suggestion and let me know if I can help more or you have more ideas :)
Salvatore.
Dear all,
after two hard months at work, I am very proud to announce the new iteration of AstroBin, with lots of cool additions and features! Here is a quick explanation of some of the things that just landed on astrobin.com:
Search by telescope and camera type.
The Advanced Search page has become even more... advanced! Now you can limit your searches to a certain type or telescope (be it apochromatic refractor, or Ritchey-Cretien, or Newtonian, and many more) or a certain type of camera (DSLR, CCD, planetary, ...).
It's easier now to plan your next purchase. For example: do you own a SBIG ST10 and want to know how it performs with apochromatic refractors? Now you search that on AstroBin!
Most popular subjects.
Heat to the Explore menu and you will find a link to a page that shows you what are the most popular subjects photographed in the sky. The list is categorized by month, and you can even select a latitude range (on Earth) to see what are the most popular subject photographed by people at your latitude. What a great way to find interesting targets for your next session!
Avatar support.
Let's give some faces to those usernames! Check your user menu: now you can upload an avatar: it will appear next to all your images.
Follow gear items and subjects.
Do you want to be notified each time an image is acquired with your favorite CCD, or telescope, or filter, of software? Do you want to be notified each time an image of a certain galaxy is uploaded? Now you can simply put your mouse cursor on the name of what you with to follow, and then click on the Follow button that will appear.
Favorites.
Now there's more than the 5-star voting mechanism to show appreciation to a certain image. Click on the Heart icon to add the image to your favorites. It will go to a new page within "My page", for you to remember. And the author might enjoy some popularity for their picture, as it might get promoted to the "Currently hot" panel on the front page!
Social front page.
Some additions join the "recently uploaded" images on the front page. Now you can see a currently hot image, and new images from the people you follow, and images recently favorited and voted 5-star (by anyone). A great way to discover great images!
Easier, more powerful and more complete Share menu.
There is now more control on how you can share images, and also social sharing on Facebook, G+ or Twitter, if you care for those!
Save time when filling in gear details for an image.
There is now a "Copy gear from image" button in your gear settings for every image: you can use to quickly import the same gear that you have used for another image in the past.
Each deep sky object has its own page.
Mouse over the name of a deep sky object, and click on "View page" in the window that appears. There you can get some data, images and interesting plots for that subject!
New plots in the Stats page.
Enough said, go check them out!
Contact form.
The Feedback button has gone, but if you want to get in touch with me, you can use the new Contact entry in the Help menu.
And now, for the curious and the techies, here's some goodness:
twitter-bootstrap
The UI front-end has been ported to twitter-boostrap: this allows for greater effectiveness of working on the UI, for some easy and cool UI elements (modal dialogs, tooltip, popovers, nice buttons, etc) and for better multi-browser support.
Caching
A few of the slowest parts of the website are now cached, so they will be faster.
Validation errors
A lot of validation error were fixed for the HTML.
Finally, a bunch of bugs was fixed too.
The amount of work has been colossal, to say the least. I have done my best to test everything, but if there are new bugs, please report them as soon as possible, so I can fix them!
I'd like to thank you all for being such an amazing community and for having treated this website really well. Thanks to you AstroBin has a reason to get better and better every day!
Salvatore.
Deas AstroBinners,
this morning I have pushed a new site update online. There four important new features:
Activity stream.
On the home page, you will see a small stream of what's happening on AstroBin. Who uploaded what, who favorited something, who commented an image, who added a new piece of gear to the database, and so on.
New workflow for adding and editing gear.
The Gear database grew a little messy, I must say. And of course this is my fault for not being a little stricter on what I allow to be inputted on the website. So, to make things easier and less errorprone I have redesigned the way Gear is added.
A campaign to sort out the mess in the Gear database.
I was saying, the Gear database is a little messy, but we can fix it! I've setup a way to all collaborate to improving the items in the database. We can submit corrections, and things will be merged where necessary. I also have a server-side routine that I will run as a script to merge the names of the makes.
A page for every gear item, with images, plots, user reviews and comments!
This is the feature I'm most excited about. Now each gear item will have its own page, and there, users can post reviews and comments. All the owners of a certain gear item, will receive a notification when there's a new review or comments. It's perfect for asking question about something that you have bought or want to buy, and get answers from the owners! :-)
So, please have a look around, help with fixing the Gear database, and have fun with the Gear pages! I expect many comments and reviews on gear items. ;-)
As usual, an incredibly large THANK YOU goes to all the translators that have done such a quick and good job this time too!