Dear all,
after two hard months at work, I am very proud to announce the new iteration of AstroBin, with lots of cool additions and features! Here is a quick explanation of some of the things that just landed on astrobin.com:

Search by telescope and camera type.
The Advanced Search page has become even more... advanced! Now you can limit your searches to a certain type or telescope (be it apochromatic refractor, or Ritchey-Cretien, or Newtonian, and many more) or a certain type of camera (DSLR, CCD, planetary, ...).
It's easier now to plan your next purchase. For example: do you own a SBIG ST10 and want to know how it performs with apochromatic refractors? Now you search that on AstroBin!

Most popular subjects.
Heat to the Explore menu and you will find a link to a page that shows you what are the most popular subjects photographed in the sky. The list is categorized by month, and you can even select a latitude range (on Earth) to see what are the most popular subject photographed by people at your latitude. What a great way to find interesting targets for your next session!

Avatar support.
Let's give some faces to those usernames! Check your user menu: now you can upload an avatar: it will appear next to all your images.

Follow gear items and subjects.
Do you want to be notified each time an image is acquired with your favorite CCD, or telescope, or filter, of software? Do you want to be notified each time an image of a certain galaxy is uploaded? Now you can simply put your mouse cursor on the name of what you with to follow, and then click on the Follow button that will appear.

Favorites.
Now there's more than the 5-star voting mechanism to show appreciation to a certain image. Click on the Heart icon to add the image to your favorites. It will go to a new page within "My page", for you to remember. And the author might enjoy some popularity for their picture, as it might get promoted to the "Currently hot" panel on the front page!

Social front page.
Some additions join the "recently uploaded" images on the front page. Now you can see a currently hot image, and new images from the people you follow, and images recently favorited and voted 5-star (by anyone). A great way to discover great images!

Easier, more powerful and more complete Share menu.
There is now more control on how you can share images, and also social sharing on Facebook, G+ or Twitter, if you care for those!

Save time when filling in gear details for an image.
There is now a "Copy gear from image" button in your gear settings for every image: you can use to quickly import the same gear that you have used for another image in the past.

Each deep sky object has its own page.
Mouse over the name of a deep sky object, and click on "View page" in the window that appears. There you can get some data, images and interesting plots for that subject!

New plots in the Stats page.
Enough said, go check them out!

Contact form.
The Feedback button has gone, but if you want to get in touch with me, you can use the new Contact entry in the Help menu.


And now, for the curious and the techies, here's some goodness:

twitter-bootstrap
The UI front-end has been ported to twitter-boostrap: this allows for greater effectiveness of working on the UI, for some easy and cool UI elements (modal dialogs, tooltip, popovers, nice buttons, etc) and for better multi-browser support.

Caching
A few of the slowest parts of the website are now cached, so they will be faster.

Validation error
A lot of validation error were fixed for the HTML.

Finally, a bunch of bugs was fixed too.

The amount of work has been colossal, to say the least. I have done my best to test everything, but if there are new bugs, please report them as soon as possible, so I can fix them!

I'd like to thank you all for being such an amazing community and for having treated this website really well. Thanks to you AstroBin has a reason to get better and better everyday!

Salvatore.

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