AstroBin's 2020: a review of this roller coaster.

I would like to take you on a trip thru 2020, to share what happened on AstroBin. This email is mostly going to be about the updates that the platform received, so, If you're interested, please get comfy and read on!

2020 has been a roller coast of a year, and everybody can testify to that. Some of us were lucky, some not so much. I have been very lucky in that nobody in my family and close circle was infected or affected by Covid-19 too much.

However, 2020 was a crisis year for me and AstroBin, due to an incident in February that caused the loss of some data. Almost all of that data has been since recovered, but there certainly was some damage. Luckily, with the efforts of manual recovery by the users affected, plus a large automatic recovery that I was able to perform, AstroBin came out much stronger.

Everything has a silver lining, and the one in this happening was that I buckled down and intensified my efforts in working on AstroBin (which, as many of you know, is still not my full-time job, even tho I'm inching closer to the dream).

So here's a birds-eye perspective of the most significant things that happened this year.

New features

• AstroBin Ultimate: in dthe Spring, I introduce the Ultimate subscription tier which brings a few new features to the plate, the most notable of which is the advanced plate-solving provided by PixInsight. I am extremely thankful to Juan Conejero and the whole PixInsight team who supported me with this. AstroBin Ultimate was definitely a success. Thank you all who jumped on it!

• Embedded ICC profiles: I'm a bit embarrassed to write this, but for the longest time AstroBin did not support embedded ICC profiles, so to have your images show colors in reasonably high-fidelity, you had to convert it to the sRGB colorspace before uploading to AstroBin. In 2020, finally, I addressed this. Now if your image has an embedded ICC profile, AstroBin will honor it and the image will look the same across all browsers and devices.

• Frontend modernization via new app: you will have noticed that some pages on AstroBin now lead you away from www.astrobin.com and to app.astrobin.com. Web development moves really fast, and when I started AstroBin in 2010, many of the tools we have today didn't exist. The website running on the app sub-domain is part of a long-term modernization effort that will allow me to improve the look, feel, and user experience of AstroBin. Currently, this includes:

  • The upload pages (image, revision, uncompressed data source)

  • The notifications page

  • The subscription pages

• Search improvements: you can now search images by publication date range (available to all subscription tiers) and Right Ascension / Declination coordinate ranges (available to Ultimate members).

• Likes on comments and forum posts: to increase social interactions, I added Like buttons to comments and forum posts. These have been received well and users are using them a lot.

• New "Rich content editor" with mentions and file uploads: to improve the forums (but also the comments and private messages) I revamped the content editor (the text area where you write your posts). The most notable new features are @mentions and file uploads. This has had a very measurable positive effects on the forums, which are seeing more and more activity.

• Click & drag zoom: the large image page received a "click & drag to zoom" functionality. This makes it easier to view the image at full resolution without the burden of an additional click and the horizontal scrolling. In the near future, I will iterate once more on that, as I have an improved version in the pipeline.

• Shadowbanning: if somebody is harassing you, you can shadowban them on AstroBin. This means that they will not be notified about it, and all their messages or comments will be invisible to anyone but themselves. They will be none the wiser about the ban, and simply get bored and cease.

Sponsorships

• Remote hosting facility sponsors: the following companies, which provide facilities to perform remote astrophotography, began or continued sponsoring AstroBin:

  • AstroCamp

  • Astro Observatories Western Australia

  • ChileScope

  • Deep Sky West

  • Goldfield Astronomical Observatory

  • Insight Observatory

  • PixelSkies

  • RemoteSkies.net

  • SkyGems observatories network

  • RoboScopes

  • SRO (Sierra Remote Observatories)

  • SkyPi Remote Observatory

• Equipment retailer sponsors: additionally, AstroBin is supported by the following retailers of astronomy equipment:

  • Lunático Astronomìa

  • Teleskop-Service

  • Tolga Astro

Platform & Infrastructure

• Major infrastructure improvements: AstroBin received very major infrastructure improvements and you have surely noticed better performance and stability. The app, which spans multiple servers and services, is now more scalable and robust than ever. Additionally, AstroBin's development workflow works on a "continuous delivery" model: this allows me to focus on the code and not the technicalities of the deployments and removes risks of deployment mistakes.

• Platform dependency updates: AstroBin is a complex and large software project, and as such, it has a vast array of software dependencies. I have worked hard to update as many of them as possible to recent versions, in order to ensure a better and better platform security and stability.

• IOTD/TP RSS feeds and social sharing: the IOTD archive page and the Top Picks list now have RSS feeds. RSS is not a particularly popular technology, at least not anymore, but it allows me to integrate some pages with third-party tools easily. Thanks to this, the AstroBin Image of the Day is shared automatically on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. The Top Picks are shared as "stories" on Instagram and Facebook. This helps with AstroBin's growth.

• New localizations: thanks to both paid translators and volunteers from the community, the following languages reached a 100% translation status:

  • Spanish

  • German

  • Russian

• Better and more automated tests: as AstroBin is a complex and large app, it needs lots of automated tests to make sure that new releases don't break existing functionality. I added many tests including a new layer of end-to-end tests.

Bonus

• Increased working hours: at the end of 2020 I reduced my day job commitment to 80%, meaning that I work there 4 days a week. Currently, my AstroBin work schedule consists of the full day every Tuesday, then every night roughly from 9 PM to 12 AM, then half a day on weekends. In total, I estimate about 30 hours weekly.

• The AstroBin heatmap: thanks to a collaboration with Jérémie Ochin, who actually did the entire work (thank you!) I released an all-time heatmap of the sky using a sample of 160,000 AstroBin images:

View fullsize

Conclusion

Congrats, you made it this far! I know this was a long email and much of it not relevant for many of you, but I operate AstroBin on the core principle of transparency, and I found it pressing to share these pieces of information as we leave 2020 behind.

Speaking of transparency, did you know that AstroBin is open-source? If you would like to help me with it, why not have a look at the code repositories on GitHub?

https://github.com/astrobin/astrobin/

https://github.com/astrobin/astrobin-ng/

AstroBin is built with Django and Angular, among other things, and if you want to have some fun together, please get in touch!

Thank you all for reading, and good luck in 2021!