May 2021 update
Before I kick-off with what what is new on AstroBin this May, I want to mention one last time, for those who missed it, that this is a very special time for me (and, by extension, for us all).
Thanks to AstroBin's growth in 2020, and the trust of so many of you who bought the Ultimate membership tier, starting from May 2021, after ten and a half years of working on AstroBin on the side, I was finally able focus on AstroBin full-time!
This is great news not only for me, as it's the coronation of a dream I have chased for 10 years, but for everybody: I have a lot of interesting things in the pipeline, and from now, AstroBin will continue improving at an accelerated pace!
Thank you so much again for your support!
Salvatore
What’s coming up next
I have been waiting for this for a long time, but it's finally here. On June 1st, come what may, I will begin actual coding work for the new AstroBin's Certified Database of Equipment (please indulge me, this probably not the actual final name, but I love the ABCDE acronym 😂).
Everything is already planned, in my head and on the back of a bunch of envelops all over my desk. The first step will be a tool that will allow a task force of volunteers to migrate the current items to the new database, merging duplicates and fixing mispelled items.
There will be a lot of manual work involved, I'm afraid, but I'm sure I can count on the community to step up and use our collective energy to distribute the work so that each volunteer will onlly have to do a small part. Unfortunately, this work cannot really be automated, because we cannot rely on string similarity to detect duplicates.
The key will be in the tool that I will write to achieve this, and it will be very important that it's done well, to pretty please don't send me any feature requests for the next couple of months, okay? 🤗
The new equipment database will allow massively useful improvements to AstroBin:
Removal of duplicate items with multiple spellings, which will allow for larger search result sets.
Inclusion of more (and accurate) equipment data, such as telescope diameter, focal length, or camera details such as pixel size, chip type, cooling capabilities, nominal noise values, and so on.
Such accurate data will be searchable via new filters in the search engine.
To ensure the accuracy of the data, it will work like a wiki system, and changes will require peer reviews.
Every equipment item will have its own page on AstroBin, with official product pictures, images taken thru that item by the community, a dedicated forum that will notify all owners/users of that particular item when there is a new topic, product reviews, and so on. The secondary goal if this effort is to allow communities to form around equipment items, to connect people who own the same items, and people who are interested in purchasing them.
AstroBin is used by many of you not only as a website to share your work and network with fellow astrophotographers, but as a research tool to validate your next purchase. This is, infact, one of the primary ways that you use AstroBin, and for this reason this is an aspect of the website that needs to be strengthened.
When I will be ready with the migration tool, I will send out invitations to volunteer.