 Astrophotography is a hobby that really rewards proper planning. And I made a video on the planning process a few years ago, but a number of the tools I demoed in that video have been updated with new and sometimes important features. And so for these updates, I've decided to make this a series this time, a series of videos because to fit it all into one video, I think it would just be too much. So for this first video in the series, I'm going to show you my most used Astrophotography tool and a good place also to start with your planning, I think, which is the website astrobin.com. Astrobin is the creation of an astrophotographer named Salvatore Yovone who started the website 10 years ago with the express purpose to help astrophotographers share their photos but also learn from one another by making it easy to share all the details, all the metadata that go into making an astrophotograph. And I'd say it's been a big success because it's now the biggest site dedicated to astrophotography with over 400,000 images uploaded, 50,000 members all over the world. And it does share some similar aspects to social media and that you can like and comment on other people's images. You can follow them to see more as they get notifications, but it's also just much more than just a social media site because Salvatore has done a great job of continually adding new features that really help astrophotographers learn from each other. And it can help a lot, I found with inspiration and with planning, which is the topic here. And what I'm going to show you in this video, before we jump in, let me just quickly disclose I am an Astrobin ambassador, which means I vouch for the website because I truly believe in it and I've been a paying member myself for many years. If you do sign up for an Astrobin subscription with my affiliate link below, you'll get 10% off your first year, and I also get a small percentage back on that first year's subscription. However, this is not a sponsored video. It's not a commercial for Astrobin. It's a video that I wanted to make an update on. I think all of what I said about Astrobin in 2018 is still completely relevant, but with all the new features like the advanced plate solving, browsing by constellation and the revamped advanced search, it was really time to dive back in. And in the series, I'm going to be diving back into a number of the tools that I talked about. I've broken this video into chapters by topic. I'm going to start with the features on the site that are open to everyone, including if you're on a free account, and then I'll show off some of the paid features that cost a few dollars a month. Okay, the first thing is if you're new to Astrobin, go ahead and click the link in my description to make an account on Astrobin, because that's going to open up a lot of the features, even if you make a free account. And if you use my link, if you do decide any time in 2021 to buy a subscription, you're going to get 10% off. So I'm going to go ahead and just submit this for a new account. It's going to ask me to go to my email and just click the activation link, which I will do. Okay, I now have my brand new account on Astrobin. And here is the Astrobin homepage. Every day there is an image of the day, which is part of the contests on Astrobin. That's sort of a fun, competitive aspect of Astrobin, but not really what I'm going to be talking about today. The next thing here about the homepage is we have some forum posts. There are a number of good forums and groups that you can sort of follow along with your interests. Like if you're more of a solar imager, there's lots of solar imaging groups. Or if you are interested in really obscure deep sky stuff, there's groups about that. The next thing down here is the global stream. And right now it's just sort of showing everything that's going on in Astrobin. But if I click on personal stream, you can see there's no activity yet. And the reason for that is I'm not following anyone on Astrobin yet. But as soon as you do start following people, then you'll see all kinds of interactions from the people you're following, like what they like and what they're posting and all of that. So there's a bunch of different options here for how to customize your homepage. In terms of planning, though, within Explorer, there's a number of different options here. I'm going to talk about a lot of these today, but let's just start with the first option, the big wall slash advanced search. The big wall is just everything being uploaded to Astrobin in order. So it starts with the most recent images being uploaded to Astrobin. And then if you just keep going through here, it just shows you every image that's being uploaded that's made public. This gives you a really interesting browse of just seeing all the different kinds of astrophotography going on. So you can see that we have lunar images, we have wide field images, we have nebular images, we have star clusters, we have galaxies. And so there's all kinds of stuff going on on Astrobin. But you can customize it to just be more along with your interests or even just follow people that have similar gear to you and things like that. But I often, like I'm interested in almost all aspects of astrophotography, so I often look at this just sort of general browse to get ideas. And when a thumbnail looks interesting to me, like this one maybe, I will maybe see what else this astrophotographer has produced. I'll look at the kinds of equipment that they are using and seeing if it's all like mine, which in this case it's not. But I still might think, well, this, I might want to approach this target in a different way. And so if it's something that I, an image that I want to return to, to think about some more, maybe something that I want to see how it would work with my gear, I'll bookmark it. And so once you add it to your bookmarks, let's actually bookmark a couple more things. OK, so I just bookmarked something else here. And then I just want to show you, we can go up here right next to our name and click on this little down triangle and go to our bookmarks. And this is just going to be our personal page of everything that we bookmarked. And so I use this all the time to remember things that I want to return to. And this I use in my planning process because I think about I browse, I find ideas on here and then I add them here for things that then I can do more planning on. So we can search, of course, for different deep sky objects we might be interested in, but I'm going to try a search for a piece of equipment here that I own, which is the Canon 2000D, also known as the Canon T7. OK, and what I can do from here is I can click on an image of something maybe that I'd be interested in shooting and I can see what equipment this person used to create this image of the sole nebula. So I can see they use the Canon 2000D, they used a Skywatcher EQ5, a guide scope and a basic guide camera and the Skywatcher EvoStar 72ED with a field flattener. So this gives me a lot of information, but other than just the gear, if I scroll down here on the technical card, I can see exactly how many pictures they took, the exposure time they use, the ISO, the moon phase, the portal scale, having all of this information is really useful for planning. And so again, I can bookmark this, I can like this. And what I would really suggest is if you find that your gear or maybe the gear you want to get is similar to Tom914 here, you know, start up a conversation with this person, you know, follow them, start adding comments, click on their name to see what other images they produced with this gear. And, you know, you'll find that this is where Astrobin becomes really valuable because it really is a social platform. And so it's really great for connecting with other astrophotographers through their images. OK, so we've gone over, you know, following people, looking at the technical card to understand, you know, what kind of equipment and sky conditions they have, using the bookmarks feature to, you know, remember things that you may want to shoot, which is really important for planning. Another interesting aspect is up here, it will tell you exactly what objects are in the picture right here. If it's a plate solved image, which most images on Astrobin are, I'll get more into that when we talk about advanced features. And then it can also tell you the constellation. So I can see that this is in Cygnus. Now, if I click on Cygnus, it's going to show me all of the different pictures of objects in that constellation. And this can be really useful. This is something pretty new in Astrobin. You can get to it either by, you know, clicking on that above any image or it's also up here in the Explorer menu. So we can click on constellations and it will bring up all of the constellations in the night sky and we can jump to any one that we want. And this is really helpful because this, you know, learning the night sky, looking out outside right now. And I can, I know that, for instance, Ursa Major is really high in my sky. So if I wanted to find all of the deep sky objects in Ursa Major and find example images, I can jump down here to Ursa Major, click on Find Images and look at that. Lots of beautiful galaxies, lots of M101s, M81 and 82s. This gives me a quick understanding of, you know, the popular objects, but also maybe some of the less popular ones. Like what do we have here? This is M100 or M, sorry, M109. And I didn't even know this was in Ursa Major. This is a really useful feature for getting to know the night sky because it's not like I can go look at Ursa Major and with my naked eye understand all of the deep sky objects hidden up there. So being able to just quickly browse through a constellation. I know that's high in my night sky right now and see all of the deep sky objects that are within that constellation is super helpful. You know, another thing that I see here is that Ursa Major is home to a lot of really popular Messier galaxies. But if I look down here, there's a Nebula. And so since I'm Nebula Photos, I want to click on that and get an idea for one where this is. So I can look right here at the sky plot to understand where it is in the night sky. I can also look at what filters were used here. So I can see that they shot this with narrowband filters, which gives me an idea for how it looks in narrowband. But now let's say I wanted to see how this particular object looked in broadband. What I can do is I can just click on the name of the object right here, NGC 3587, or I could click on Owl Nebula either way. And it brings up all of the pictures of the Owl Nebula on Astrobin. And on a free subscription, what you'd have to do is just sort of click through and find one until you can find it in broadband or with a DSLR camera. Once you get move up to even the lowest tier paid subscriptions, you get some access to these filters right here. And that's where the advanced search gets a lot more powerful. So let's go ahead and jump into that. I'm going to switch accounts real quick here. OK, I'm now on a paid account. You can see it has my real name there, Nico Carver. And I'm going to go ahead and add a filter to our search for the Owl Nebula. And I'm going to add the filter camera type. It adds it right here. And then I can pick DSLR and click Search. And then this is smart enough that it looks through all of the pictures on Astrobin of the Owl Nebula, and it will only show me the ones that were taken with a DSLR. OK, so this is great. So I now can see what it looks like with a DSLR. This actually happens to be a telescope that I own. That was completely unintentional. But it's pretty cool that this is a really nice inexpensive refractor that works well with a DSLR. And I can see how what kind of results I could get. This person did spend a fair amount of time shooting this 13 and a half hours. But what I really like about this is that you know, I started with just this really close in image of the Owl Nebula in it with narrowband filters and now just through using the filters and the advanced search, I can understand, wow, it's in context with this other interesting object over here and that it's it's accessible with, you know, a DSLR camera, an inexpensive refractor and a Star Tracker because I can see this person, Nick Ambrose, was using an Ioptron SkyGyder Pro. And it's really well situated in my night sky right now because I know Ursa Major is nice and high and is up all night. So I wanted to show that, you know, just through a little bit of searching and using the filters, this becomes a really powerful planning tool for picking your next deep sky object to shoot because there's a lot of really neat things out there in the night sky that don't get as much attention as, you know, the few showpiece objects like the Pinwheel Galaxy, Andromeda, Orion and that kind of thing. And so I use this all the time to find really unusual stuff. One way is I am a member of a group called like unusual deep sky objects. So that's one way you can do it. But another way is just browsing, you know, just just going to the big wall, looking through things, you know, once you see a thumbnail, it's like, well, I've never seen that deep sky object before, all always bookmark it. And a lot of times I'm bookmarking things that I see through the awards. That's what all these little things in the upper left hand corner are. And some of these are, you know, are not unusual deep sky objects. They're just they're they're ones that I just think are really well done. And so they're inspirations for me to, you know, just try to be as good as I can be with something like the Cone Nebula or M78. But some of these are really, you know, lesser imaged objects. Like this one is what I really want to do. I just think it looks so neat. The mask, isn't that cool? The eyes and the, you know, the frown that that just looks so interesting. I think it looks so 3D. I find Astrobin is is the site to go to for inspiration, because it's all astrophotography, it's a lot of deep sky astrophotography, which is really my passion. And there's just so much interesting stuff going on here. And then once you, you know, find something that you like, you can see what kind of gear they used, you can see how much total integration was needed. So in this case, 7.7 hours from a portal six zone, but with narrow band filters. And so you can compare that to what you have, and then you can plan out an approach so you can know, well, this is going to take me some time. I'm going to want to use my narrow band filters and go from there. All right, another feature that I want to talk about here is something that was added in the past year or so, which is on a lot of images. You're going to mouse over them like this and see this advanced plate solver powered by Pix Insight. And this is really neat because the old plate solver was great, but this one is so much better. It can you can customize it. You can get this grid. You can get all kinds of more obscure objects like the sharpness objects, galaxies, you know, little planetary nebula, all kinds of stars. And then it also shows you right down here. The right ascension and declination of whatever point you are on the image. So let's say I was actually looking at a wide field image. OK, so I just pulled up one of my wide field images. And even in this view, which is the fit to screen view, you can see that the advanced plate solver will come up when I mouse over here. This is because I'm on the ultimate subscription with Astrobin. This isn't this isn't available on all tiers. But what's really cool is even if you go to my image, this view will come up, even if you're on the free plan. And so I can mouse over anything here. And know exactly what it is and right ascension and declination. And it will it has labeled almost everything in this wide field image of Cepheus, so I can go back here and know, oh, you know what? Later, I really want to shoot this weird little ribbon like Nebula. And now I know that it's called Sharpless 133. OK, I went back to the technical card here. I want to show you that from this view, we've already talked about, you can click on the individual objects in the image. You can click on the constellation. There's yet another option to find other images in the same area, which is if you go down here, there's this button now. And this is so cool. You can you can find objects within one degree, two degrees, three degrees, five degrees of this image. So I'm going to choose around one degree. This is a pretty wide field image and it picks the center of the image. And then it does a one degree radius on that and finds all of the images that are within one degree of the center of the image. Isn't that neat? So this is where Astrobin really sets itself apart from all of the other websites where you can share astrophotography in that by plate solving everything, it's a very advanced database that lets you do a lot of neat planning. So if I wanted to shoot this Bernard 174, here's a bunch of excellent images of it. I'm just going to go back and show you what it what it would happen if instead of choosing around one degree of the center of this image, I chose around five degrees. OK, so I just chose five degrees instead of one degree. And then I want to show you what happens with the filters up here. So it automatically added additional filters for field radius, right, ascension and declination. And these are sliders. So I can slide this up and say, instead of searching now five degrees out from that center, let's search 20 degrees out. OK, and even more images came back. This is really what sets Astrobin apart from from all other astrophotography hosting websites is just how rich this advanced search is and how rich rich the browsing is with a huge database of images. So there are other websites that have some neat tools. There are other websites that maybe have more images like Facebook or something like that. But there is no website that combines these two in such an interesting way. Really advanced tools based on plate solving and advanced filters and equipment database and all that with a huge amount of images, hundreds of thousands of images. OK, another really helpful thing in Astrobin is the groups feature. So this is a list of all of the public groups on Astrobin. I got to it just by clicking explore groups. And this can be really helpful when thinking about, you know, new gear to pick up because there is a lot of groups dedicated to particular pieces of gear like the Celestron Rossa or particular filters or particular cameras. And so you can both see all of the different images being taken with those with that particular camera. And you can also join the group and look at its forum and, you know, ask questions before you buy all of those kinds of things. You can you can also, you know, go in here and start following people who own equipment that's similar to you. So this is really helpful. It can give you an idea of. What's possible with certain equipment? And also what, you know, what combination of equipment might work well? So because if you if you see an image that's that's quite impressive and they're using this thing and this thing and this thing together, you know that it worked well to produce this particular image. What I use groups for even more, though, than talking about particular pieces of gear is something that I find is unique to Astro-Bin, which is sort of obscure topics like my very favorite groups that I'm a part of are Fine Art Astrophotography, because that's a group dedicated to talking about astrophotography as Fine Art, not just, you know, as a hobby, which is something, you know, I'm all for it being a hobby, but I'm also interested in it as an art form and then Deep Sky Mosaic Deep Sky Mosaic. So this is a group dedicated to just people who are crazy enough to work on Deep Sky Mosaic, which often take years. And then this one is really great, unique or unusual Deep Sky targets because it just has so many things that are off the beaten track. And so these are the kinds of things that I typically really like going after because they're more of a challenge. So this video has mostly been about, you know, how to use Astro-Bin, the website as a planning tool, how to how to investigate images, look at the gear that's being used, look at how to find them in the night sky, look at, you know, for other objects that are around it, that kind of thing. But I also just want to point out that Astro-Bin is really a community website and it only gets better the more that you put into it. So I'd recommend that if you do like Astro-Bin, get a subscription, you know, start putting up your images, always fill out, you know, all the information about them, start getting active on the forums, start commenting on other people's images and that you'll get a lot more out of it the more that you actually engage with the Astro-Bin community. And the last thing I'll say is that I am, again, an Astro-Bin ambassador. So if you have any questions about using the website, you can leave a comment under this video, you can reach out to me personally. You know, you can message me on Astro-Bin. All of these are good options. I'm always welcome to answer any questions about it because it is a site that I truly believe in and use daily.