Introducing AstroBin.com

[siovene]

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.

[siovene]

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.

[siovene]

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!

[siovene]

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 :)

[naavis]

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!

[siovene]

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!

[siovene]

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!

[Kaizu]

Was it possible to change the feeding of observing place coordinates so that also desimal degrees were accepted.

Kaizu

[siovene]

Hi Kaizu, in the Location form you can input degrees, minutes and seconds. That should be precise enough :)

[Kaizu]

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

[siovene]

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.

[siovene]

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.

[siovene]

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!