January 2022 update
January was a slow month for AstroBin: my family and I moved house and it was a much bigger time sink than I anticipated. This impacted the new equipment database work, which is critical in terms of complexity, risk, and mental drainage, so I worked on easier and more minor features and bug fixes instead.
Read on to learn more about what's new on AstroBin and what's coming up next.
Since we're on the last day of the year, I wish each and everyone of you a year full of health, prosperity, and love. Happy New Year! ❤️
🌠 New image revision viewer
You can now navigate image revisions more quickly and intuitively. When you click on the thumbnail of an image revision, you get a pop-up box with the image in larger size, and can navigate between revisions with the left/right arrow kets, your scrollwheel, or by clicking on the left or right half of the image.
If you want to access the actual revision image's page, as before (e.g. if you want to see the plate-solution annotations), you can do it by clicking on the View page button.
☁ New subject types added
You can now specify Noctilucent clouds and Meteor shower as subject types for your images (the latter available after you've selected Solar system body or event).
This is of course also available as part of the Subject type search filter.
Many images were updated automatically, but you might want to go and update
your past images via the Edit menu if you have such images.
🔎 Improvement to the search by objects in a catalog
AstroBin's search is now more robust if you search for objects in the M, NGC, IC, LBN, LDN, and PGC catalogs, and the correct images will be found if you search with a space or without a space (e.g. M16 or M 16).
This used to work already for the M, NGC and IC catalog simply because, for the plate-solved images, Astrometry.net uses a space and PixInsight does not, so images would be double-tagged for search already; but it's now been formalized and cleaned up in order to work also for the LBN, LDN and PGC catalogs.
💬 Improvement to the forum and comment search
Searching by forum content and image comment content has been split, so you can finally search the forums properly!
The excerpt and highlighting of the search results has been improved, so you can see more of the context of the posts you're seeing, and the UI has also been improved to be more readable and usable.
🗑 "Empty trash" added
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:
💬 Fixed annoying issue with QUOTE button in forums
There used to be an issue with the quote button for the forum posts, and the button would randomly get stuck in a loading state. I'm not sure how long this has been the case, because I only got one report about it but the issue was quite frequent. In any case, the bug 🐛 has been squashed!