Telescope Reviews: Announcement: finally a home for our astrophotos!

Dear friends,

almost exactly a year ago I set to work an a very ambitious project. It took almost every evening and weekend for 12 months, but now I'm ready to launch it!

Many times, on this and other forums, I've seen lots of astrophotographs being scattered all over the Internet: on general purpose image hosting websites, as forum uploads, on personal websites, or even on disposable spaces.

Each time I've seen an astrophoto uploaded on ImageShack, festered with horrible pop-up advertisements, with no accompanying data about its acquisition, I cringed.

I believe that the astrophotography community deserves a lot more, and the fantastic amount of scientific data it produces cannot be lost in a sea of chaos.

And this is why today I introduce you AstroBin!

http://www.astrobin.com/

Here's a snippet from the help page:

AstroBin provides a number of features that are tailored specificlly to astrophotography. Here's a quick run down of the main ones:

Dedication to data

On a general purpose image sharing site, you would upload your image and be done with it. AstroBin, instead, has a user interface specifically designed to enable you to input all the technical data of your image. AstroBin will autocomplete your input using a vast database: everything from telescopes, CCDs and filters to astronomical objects in many catalogues will show in popup dialogs for easy selection when you start typing their names. AstroBin is connected to the SIMBAD Astronomical Database, which contains over 5 million objects under over 15 million names!

Data is strongly interconnected

Have you ever wanted to see how your next image is going to look like? On AstroBin, you can search for all images of a certain target that were taken with a certain telescope and a certain CCD or camera. Or a certain filter. How about all the images between 6 and 8 hours of integration? Or with a certain Moon phase? You can do that!

All the data at a glance

Each image on AstroBin is annotated of all the technical details about its acquisition. Telescopes involved, cameras, mounts, filters, everything is visible at a glance in the Technical Card. Even the Moon age at the time of the acquisition is displayed.

More than just an image

AstroBin will do more than just host a copy of your image: when you upload a photograph, a histogram and a black & white inverted version of the image will be generated on the fly, so it's easier to spot faint nebulosity regions or spiral arms. Images will also be plate solved, and an annotated version will appear on the site. AstroBin will know what are the astronomical objects in your image without you telling!

AstroBin supports multiple image revisions

Don't tell me you have never gone back to revise the processing of an image after you had published it. AstroBin embraces this concept and lets you publish several revisions of the same image easily and intuitively! Now it's going to be really easy to tell whether your processing has improved.

AstroBin is social!

On AstroBin you can message other astrophotographer, follow them and be notified when they post new images, or perform requests for more data. You can also vote on images.

As you have undoubtly realized by now, AstroBin is way more than an image hosting service. It's what the Astrophotography community has needed for a long time. For years, I have seen amazing images scattered all over the Internet: general purpose image hosting sites, forums, personal websites and even temporary places. Some of those images contain data that is too precious to go wasted in a sea of chaos. AstroBin comes to the rescue to provide a home and a central hub for astrophotographers all over the world.

So, to do things right, I decided to start slowly. AstroBin will officially open up for everybody in a few days. In the meantime, the fastest of you who PM me, I will create an account on AstroBin and you can start uploading your photo. Your feedback and error reporting will be extremely useful to fix the final minor problems before the site is ready for everybody.

If you read so far, let me treat you with a sneak preview of a image's page on AstroBin:

http://i.imgur.com/Z8wfn.jpg

I hope that my hard work on this website is something you guys appreciate! I'm looking forward for you account requests and feedback and ideas!nt!

Thank you,
Salvatore.