Voluntary donations for additional support
Hi!
I am Salvatore, the creator of AstroBin.
I'm not sure if you knew this, but AstroBin is not the product of a team of people working in an office as many think. Rather, it's the result of an intense effort that I have been putting in since 2010, mostly all by myself.
My interest in astronomy led me to try astrophotography in 2010, and that's when I realized that the Internet needed a centralized repository of the output of the amateur astrophotography community.
I started to work on AstroBin and I announced it in 2011.
Over the course of the years, I have received invaluable help: from the team of translators, and from the IOTD staff, most notably. I have also received countless ideas and suggestions from the community. However, what matters, in the end, is the estimated nearly 11,000 hours that I personally invested working on AstroBin.
I'm talking about engineering time, which takes the largest bulk, but of course user support, customer support, server maintenance, troubleshooting, and a plethora of other activities.
In the beginning, the website was for free, but as it grew larger and larger I could no longer afford to pay for it, and neither ads nor a model based solely on donations were cutting it. So, in 2016, I introduced paid memberships to help me pay for the website and all the time I invested into it.
After 10 years of struggling with very limited time, having a day job and being a father of two young children, in May 2021 I was finally able to go full-time on AstroBin, thanks to your support, as the astrophotography community deserves my full dedication to run a project like AstroBin.
If you would like to contribute more than your paid subscription, please click on the button below to head over to the donations page, where you will be able to set up a recurring donation of an amount of your choosing, which you can of course cancel at any time.
Please keep in mind that donations are not linked to the Lite/Premium/Ultimate subscriptions in any way: they are completely voluntary and a way to provide extra support to AstroBin!
Thank you!
Salvatore
About me
I'm from Italy and I was born in Naples in 1981. I started being interested in astronomy since I was around 12 or 13 years old. At the age of 14, my parents bought me a telescope, the classic 114/900 Newtonian, that I would lug up and down the stairs or our building to get to the roof and observe from our light-polluted city.
After I graduated from school, the interest waned a bit, and I got busy with other aspects of life. But in 2010 my passion was rekindled, and I took an interest in astrophotography.
As a trade, I'm a professional software engineer. Between 2005 and 2017, I lived in Finland, where I worked for Nokia and then Intel. It's there that I met my wife, with whom I have a spirited 11-year-old girl and a sweet 8-year-old boy.
In 2017, the whole family and I relocated to Switzerland, where we currently live.
I have worked on AstroBin in my free time since November 2010, and I don't intend to stop. If anything, I want to make this a bigger part of my life because I realize how much potential there is in a platform like this, and how much it can be useful to the amateur astrophotography community. AstroBin is a labor of love, and I honestly enjoy working on it very much.
In May 2021, I was finally able to transition to working on AstroBin full-time, thanks to the support by you all!