August 2022 update
Equipment database progress update
During the past couple of months the new equipment database rolled out to all users, and I've been monitoring the progress of the migration. At the time of writing, 74.77% of AstroBin images have at least partial coverage of the new equipment database, and this is a massive success! 🎉
This means that I can proceed with releasing the new search filters as planned (see below).
The roll out phase has been incredibly delicate and stressful, due to the magnitude of changes affecting AstroBin and you, the users.
I apologize to anyone who got a rocky start due to some initial user interface pains, but I had no way to smoothen the edges without releasing and getting feedback.
Thank you to everybody who provided feedback, and a massive thank you to the equipment database moderators who help with its maintenance! ❤️
Quick recap of why the new equipment database was needed and what it enables
The old equipment database allowed data insertion in free form, which caused lots of duplicates and spelling mistakes. This fragmented search results and made it impossible to create communities around equipment items, because astrophotographers and images were scattered across the various duplicates (hundreds in some cases)!
The new equipment database is more rigid in the way you interact with it, which makes it very difficult to create duplicates.
I understand that this also makes it more time consuming to use, but we can't have our cake and eat it too, and I much prefer that have powerful tools at our disposal, some of which are listed here:
A single-source-of-truth for the long-term preservation of technical details and information of all equipment items pertaining astrophotography.
The ability to create communities around equipment items (easily connect with people who have the same equipment as you by posting to the forum of a specific equipment item).
The ability to perform advanced searches by technical properties of equipment items, and get more results due to the defragemntation of the search database.
Searching equipment items by technical properties, and seeing a comparison table of items in the same category.
Things that are coming up soon, thanks to the new equipment database
In additions to all the features related to the new equipment database that you can use today, the following new features are coming real soon:
New advanced search filters to find images acquired by equipment items that match specific technical property ranges (e.g. telescope diameter, focal length, camera pixel size, pixel number, mount payload, and so on).
The ability to “follow” equipment items and get notified when new images are posted that use them.
The ability to select ready-made equipment presets for known remote hosting facilities.
The revamping of the “acquisition details" form, that can finally take advantage of the new frontend stack to which AstroBin has been migrating over the past few years.
Image collaboration
Moving on from the topic of the new equipment database, I'm happy to introduce a new feature to AstroBin today: “image collaborations”.
If you post an image that is a group effort among several collaborators, you can tag the other people involved when uploading or editing your image.
This will have the following effects:
The image will appear in the galleries of all collaborators involved (sorting and using collections will work as expected).
Followers of all collaborators will be notified of the new image and its revisions.
All collaborators will be notified of likes, bookmarks, and comments.
All stats (likes, bookmarks, comments, views, AstroBin Index…) will affect all collaborators.
The image will appear in search results when searching for the name or username of any of the collaborators.
The only limitation, is that only the person who uploads the image will be in control of editing any details, adding revisions, and adding/removing collaborators.