September 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, 77.94% 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).
Thank you to everybody who provided feedback, and a massive thank you to the equipment database moderators who help with its maintenance! ❤️
One more quick recap of why the new equipment database was needed and what it enables
Please note: this section is the same as last month's, but I thought it might be a good idea to repeat it one more time. Feel free to skip if you've read it already.)
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 that one time when you need to add a new equipment item that you're using for the first time on AstroBin, 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.
Selecting equipment items by browsing in addition to searching
In addition to being able to find equipment items to add to your image by searching using free text (which, by the way, also got slightly smarter and more flexible this month) you can now browse by brand and some technical properties.
This should make it easier to find items in the database that you are using for an image for the first time, and therefore are not available in the "quick-add recent" section of the page.
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 (I wanted to release some of these things in September already, but unfortunately I'm a bit late):
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.
Bug fixes and smaller improvements
I don't often mention this, because, as a software engineer, it feels like a given to me, but this month too I addressed several small bugs and implemented a few minor improvements.
Some of the things worth mentioning:
Improved the UI of the user avatar (and surrounding components) both on desktop and mobile
Added 30 more submitters to the IOTD/TP process, which was suffering a bit from an imbalance in the teams (this means that there will be a few more Top Picks per day moving forward)
Fixed the "No data" section of user galleries to account for the new equipment database
Improved the infrastructure of the asynchronous jobs that update the search database
Fixed issue that made you able to Like a deleted image if you had the page already opened before it was deleted
Fixed an issue with incorrect images being shown when you searched for an object from a known catalog (e.g. M27, NGC100...)
Fixed the slideshow over collections to make it respect key/value ordering if present
Added the ability to have sponsored links go directly to the sponsored item's page instead of the brand's page
Several fixes and improvements for the equipment moderators' workflow
What's planned for October
The following things are on my task list for October. I'll try to do them all but things don't always go as planned because there might be a varying amount of user support requests.
Before I proceed, I would like to make clear that when a user has an issue with AstroBin, I take a great deal of care in investigating it, no matter how rare a bug it might be.
Sometimes this means spending several days of work to fix an issue that affects only one user, delaying the implementation of other features.
For October, I plan the following:
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 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 (that's the final piece of the puzzle for the modernization of the image upload form, and, as some of you have noticed, it now sticks out as a sore eye😁 I know that it's a clunky form, and I can't wait to make it better!)