Introducing AstroBin.com

[siovene]

Helo everybody, please bear with me and my English, because there's no way I would write such a long message in Finnish :)

I want to tell you about a project I've been working on for the past year: an image hosting service specifically made for astrophotographers, called AstroBin.

AstroBin, which you can find at http://www.astrobin.com/ is seeking to preserve the value inherent to the great scientific-grade output that the astrophotograph community has produced for so many years.

It was born out of the desire to end something I had seen for too long, something that I didn't want to see: the waste of incredible material to the sea of chaos that the Internet can be. For years, I have seen fantastic astrophotographs being uploaded to Internet Forums, often with little or no data, or to general purpose image hosting site, invariably with no data attached.

Such an image would be seen by some people, then quickly forgotten, and reduced to nothing more than a bunch of pixel in the giant wasteland of the Internet.

I respected the Astrophotography community too much to allow this, so I decided to do something about it. AstroBin is the result: an effort to host, collect, index and categorize the output of the astrophotographers all over the world, so that their precious data would serve a purpose, and have a meaning forever.

So, let me tell you why you too should upload your astro-images to AstroBin, and contribute:

Unlimited uploads, unlimited size, for free
Astrophotography images have scientific value that shouldn't be lost in file compression. On AstroBin you can (and should!) upload full size images. And you have unlimited space for free.

Smart albums
Your astro-images will be automatically organized in dynamic and intelligent albums: by subject type (nebulae, clusters, galaxies...), by year and by equipment used.



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.



Have your data neatly plotted
Data is everything, and AstroBin will give you the tools to keep your data neat and organized. And with our plots, you can get insights on your productivity and on the gear you use the most.




In conclusion, 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. Posting your astrophotographs on AstroBin not only means you gain a great place to store your work, a great way to keep your data consistent and organized and fantastic tool to accompany you in your hobby; it also means you are contributing something to the community, you are helping others know what to expect from their equipment, and you are keeping important data safe and organized.

If you are as convinced as I think you are, go ahead and sign up at http://astrobin.com/accounts/register/ !


PS: I wanted to translate the website to Finnish too, but this hasn't happened yet. I hope soon!

I hope you like AstroBin and find it useful. Please don't hesitate to let me know if you have suggestions, comments, critiques, ideas, or you need help with it!

Thank you all,
  Salvatore.

[J-P]

Wow!!!

Count me in, what a wonderful new and fresh approach! Have you done this alone, or is there a group behind?
You don't have to tell us, how this all is financed... this can't be money laundering surely 

Only thing i'm little worrying, are possible copyright problems with full size material. I have had some bad experiences about illegal usage of my pictures earlier.
Maybe kind of optional and automated "water mark" system could be good, I mean something subtle enough added to an image to prevent unauthorized usage?

Thank you for the hard work and a massive input to astro community.

J-P Metsävainio, http://astroanarchy.zenfolio.com/

Ps.

This is something, that should be published in "Tähdet & Avaruus" magazine and in Avaruus.fi news!
Generally this should have as much international attention as possible to AstroiBin to reach the "critical mass"...

[siovene]

Hey JP,
I'm honored beyond what words can express, to receive appreciation from you, an imager that I admire so much!

I can openly answer all your questions :)

At the moment, AstroBin is not financed, that is I'm paying for it :) I just started a month ago, and the expense is not too much, so I can justify it as "hobby money". I'm not stupid though, and I've made my calculation: while I think the site can continue as it is right now for some times, if it starts growing beyond control I will have to monetize it. I hope to delay this as much as I can, so I will think then how to monetize (pro accounts? ads? donations?). Let's see how it goes and enjoy the moment. This is something that I did out of "pure intentions", for the good of the community, so we're cool as long as I can afford it :)

The second question is if I've done this alone, and the answer is yes. 99.5% alone :) There are a couple of small things a friend did, but less than 1% for sure. I have worked nights and weekends for a year!

And finally, the watermarking is something that's been sitting in my TODO list far too long, thanks for reminding me! I'll get around to doing it soon (I guess after the holidays, because I will travel home).

Oh, and about your PS: I have thought about the press, maybe in the future I will write to some magazine :) It would be great for AstroBin to reach critical mass because more data means better searches, and more interesting things to devise.

Unfortunately the site is not translated to Finnish yet (Lauri are you reading this? ;) ), but hopefully soon. Only then, I think I can propose a press release to Tähdet & Avaruus.

Finally, let me thank you again for the interest and the encouragement, and if you have more ideas and suggestions, please let me know!

Salva.

[Ransu]

Very impressive work Salvatore you have done lot of wok with that. I will check this closer, it looks that this could help me to organize and archive astropictures.
Thank you for your hard work!

[siovene]

Hey Rauno, yes indeed, that would be one strong reason to use AstroBin. It will keep your data neat and organized. That way you don't have to worry about losing data :) People have even uploaded images they had forgotten what was they were of, and used the plate-solving so AstroBin would tell them :)

[Lauri Kangas]

Unfortunately the site is not translated to Finnish yet (Lauri are you reading this? ;) )

Yes! Let's try to get this ready ASAP.

[jussi_k_kojootti]

Oh my how far it's gotten!  Super useful with the semi-automatic gear, conditions and target categorization.  And the site looks really nice too!  I'm uploading mine as of right now 

[rintape]

Just loaded my first image.

I am very, very impressed. I registered, logged in, selected my gear, loaded image in about four minutes. Not once did I have to stop to figure out how something is done. Probably the easiest, most intuitive piece of software that I have ever used. And could it be that even my image looks better at Astrobin

Just exellent.

Petri

[Ransu]

Agree with Petri, this brilliant software is very easy to use. I have downloaded few of my images and this will be the place where i keep my Astropics.
I think this will become very popular place

[nepa]

Am I the only one who cannot see any pictures on the site?

[fsol77m]

i am little curious about the servers that run astrobin... are they crash proofed ? (two or more machines with spare raid packs ready to go instantly etc? upses for electricity breakdowns and protecting from thunders etc ?) and hope that your servers have enough crashproof/backed-up space needed for "millions" of photographs 

it isn't fun when someone is uploading couple of million photos and all gone if your server crashes etc 

[Jorma Koski]

Looks like it's powered by Amazon, the biggest shop in the net.

[Lauri Kangas]

i am little curious about the servers that run astrobin... are they crash proofed ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_S3

"S3 is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year.[14]"

[siovene]

Am I the only one who cannot see any pictures on the site?

Hi. Were you the one who emailed me about this? If not, I have 3 reports about this.
I'll try to get some support from Amazon about this. It's really odd, because I've received only 3 complaints while many thousands people have seen the site, and hundreds keep returning every day.

i am little curious about the servers that run astrobin... are they crash proofed ? (two or more machines with spare raid packs ready to go instantly etc? upses for electricity breakdowns and protecting from thunders etc ?) and hope that your servers have enough crashproof/backed-up space needed for "millions" of photographs 

it isn't fun when someone is uploading couple of million photos and all gone if your server crashes etc 

As Lauri and Jorma said, the images are on Amazon S3. It's extremely durable, available and scalable. There will never be a problem on that side.
The actual website, instead, runs on a Linode instance, and I have daily backups.
Linode has redundant storage, so data will be safe there too. With regards to scalability, AstroBin has been designed with scalability in mind. When one instance will not be enough, I have the means to add another one, and use a load balancer in front of the instances.

It will be many years until there are millions of images though :)

[einari]

One thing that comes to mind when I browsed the site.
I expected more in the line of legal stuff but all I found was this sentence
"The images on this websites are copyright of their respective owners. "

This is a good sentence itself but I  think there should be privacy policy somewehere.