November 2021 update
November was a again mostly dedicated to the new upcoming equipment database.
Huge progress has been made and we are on schedule for roll-out some time during January.
Read on to learn more about what's new on AstroBin and what's coming up next (and remember: the list doesn't include bug fixes, most infrastructure work, and smaller features 😛).
🎂 Happy 10th birthday AstroBin!
It seems like yesterday I started working on AstroBin, but it was November 27th 2010 (basically eons ago) when I sat down and created an empty project folder. I toiled at it a whole year and didn't tell anyone, exactly a year later I announced it, and thus the journey begun.
Today, AstroBin is a full-time job, a single-proprietorship company registered here in Switzerland, and thanks to you and the sponsors mentioned at the bottom of this email, it can support my family of four.
I am extremely grateful for this opportunity, and I sincerely hope I can continue to serve this fantastic community for the next 10 to 20 years. ❤️
📷 Progress on the new equipment database
Work on the new equipment database and module, which is the highlight of 2021, is ongoing, and during November we made a lot of progress again.
These are the highlights:
The AstroBin toolkit to enable the maintenance of the database by the community at large, wikipedia-style, is complete (save perhaps some minor additions and modifications as I begin getting feedback when I roll out the deployment gradually).
David Stevenson, Matthew MacLean and Gernot Schreider have done a lot of work to generate an initial set of consistently named object with the goal of covering the majority of AstroBin users and images. It's important to not start with a blank state and release the tools into the wild, to ensure naming consistency.
I'm working on integrating the new equipment database in the upload process and technical card on AstroBin, so I can begin rolling this out slowly and get feedback.
When I roll it out, you will be able to migrate your existing gear on AstroBin to the corresponding items in the new equipment database. We are working on doing this automatically for as many items as possible, but given that there are 140,000 items in the current database (due to the duplication and fragmentation issues I've discussed in the past), and many of them are not unambiguously identifiable as a certain product, we will need the help of the large community.
What's the expected timeline for all this?
In December, I hope to perform the initial population of the new equipment database with a curated list of the most popular items from the most popular brands. Would you like to help? Please get in touch!
In January, I hope that I can gradually roll out the tools to enable the community to collaborate on the equipment database and migrate the legacy database.
In February, I hope that I have completed work on the community pages for equipment items and the new search tools and that the new equipment database will be used by everyone.
🏅 Preparation for the IOTD/TP team 2022: call for Submitter and Reviewer volunteers
I have spent a considerable amount of time, last month, preparing the process for the IOTD/TP team 2022.
This led to to the election of 8 IOTD Judges for 2022:
Thank you to all the voters and of course to the Judges!
Learn more about the IOTD/TP process here: welcome.astrobin.com/iotd
🗺 New sky spot / finding chart on images plate- solved with PixInsight
Thanks to a very nice improvement provided by the PixInsight team, images plate-solved by the advanced plate-solving engine provided by PixInsight on AstroBin now enjoy a nicer sky plot / finding chart.
You can click it to see a larger version, and the look is consistent with the image annotations.
👨👩 🔭 Improvements to the Groups feature
Joining Groups on AstroBin is now available to all members, including those on a Free account.
Additionally, I made a few improvements to the Groups module, such as increased performance of the list thanks to paginating it, adding a search input, and adding the ability to sort images in a Group by Title, Publication (default), or key/value tags!
Learn more about AstroBin Groups:
🔎 Search terms highlighted on the image page
For the "it's the small things" series, now when you click on an image after a search, the matching terms in the page will be highlighted.
In the screenshot above, I searched for "Abell GSO Moravian", because I wanted to see images of Abell clusters acquired with a GSO telescope and a Moravian camera and ended up on one of my old images 😊
🛫 Performance improvements
Every month or two I review the database logs in search for performance improvement. This time I was able to vastly simplify some common queries thanks to removing some data models and relations that weren't needed anymore.
This has led to a lower load on AstroBin's database replicas, and therefore better performance!
Chinese (Simplified) localization
Thanks to the work of 雅痞张, AstroBin is now available in Simplified Chinese. Please join me in thanking him, and tell your Chinese speaking friends!
Unfortunately though, there are still delays in enabling the AliPay payment method on AstroBin. Our secure payment provider, Stripe, is working to fix the issue.
S€PA Direct Debit payments support
If your currency is the Euro, you can now pay on AstroBin using the S€PA Direct Debit payment method. As with the other payments, keep in mind that:
AstroBin only charges you once, there is no recurring payment option at the moment.
AstroBin does not store your bank (or credit card) information on its server, for your protection.