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On Wed 9 December, we will roll out a major upgrade to BAA member pages.
The new-look member pages, which will be renamed “member albums”, will have greatly improved search facilities, better handling of large high-resolution images, and will also plate-solve images where possible.
To enable the upgrade to take place, we will start disabling some functions from 9am on Wednesday. You temporarily won’t be able to upload new images, or leave comments.
We will hope to have the new system live by around 1pm, and from that time you’ll be able to start uploading images again.
I will post further updates here once the upgrade is completed.
The ability to upload multiple images against an observing report rather than having to construct a composite image would be useful eg
https://britastro.org/node/23284
Robin
The new member albums are now live. We had a few minor teething issues earlier today, but you should now be able to upload images using the new interface.
Existing links should continue to work. They will point to an archived version of your old member page content, with some features disabled – e.g. the ability to leave comments.
The new image gallery software is able to do this, but currently it is only permitted for gallery administrators (e.g. archivists uploading images on behalf of BAA sections) to associate multiple files with a single observation.
We can certainly consider rolling this out to all BAA members in due course, once we emerge from the immediate post-launch testing phase.
One oddity that has emerged since the upgrade….If I try to log in using Microsoft Edge I just get Dominic’s profile filling the page as if I am Dominic!!!! I can go no further….. HOWEVER, using Google Chrome I can log in as normal with no problem, as I have done to type this query………..
Martin
Martin,
I inadvertently set the log-in page to redirect to my profile at around 2pm, and it was like that until around 2.45pm. Which was a bit of a screw-up…
To make this more awkward, most web browsers cache web page redirections for around 24 hours. So, if you tried to log in with a particular browser while it was broken, you may continue to have trouble logging in for a little while.
In Firefox, you can fix this by going to History -> Clear recemt history…. If you delete your browser history from the past couple of hours, it’ll forget about the erroneous redirect. Or, if you do nothing, it should fix itself by tomorrow.
Sorry about that,
Dominic
OK Dominic, many thanks for confirming it wasn’t me accidentally trying to hack your profile!
I will simply keep using Chrome for the BAA pages today and check with Edge again tomorrow.
I just succeeded in uploading an image so that all appears to work fine.
Martin
Congratulations, Dominic, on your improvements – a nerve-wracking process I expect.
One question. I notice that some of my images have been ‘plate solved’. I don’t speak that language, so what does it mean and why has it been done? (Sorry – that was two questions!)
Thanks
Alan
Now that the archives of the Deep Sky and Comet sections can be viewed from the same place, do we still need to send images to the sections as well as the member album?
Graham
Hi Graham, I can’t speak for other sections but as far as the Comet Section is concerned you should continue to submit images directly (info on how to do that is here). Once they’ve been checked the images will then appear in the Comet Section archive here, and through Dominic’s coding magic, they will also appear in the new gallery.
Hi Alan,
Thanks for your kind words! Plate-solving refers to the process of looking at the pattern of stars in an image, and attempting to match it against a star catalogue in order to work out the celestial coordinates of the image. We use a piece of software called astrometry.net to do this. However, the software takes a few minutes to run, and newly uploaded observations join a queue to be processed, which means there is a delay between you uploading an image and the celestial coordinates appearing in the associated metadata.
When the plate-solver finds a match, you should see a panel to the right-hand side of your image with a tick-box “Enable overlay”. This will overlay a star chart over the top of your image.
Best wishes,
Dominic
Hi Dominic, Nice upgrade to the members pages, I’ve just uploaded an image to test out the new plate solving capability!
Is it still possible to add hyperlinks in the “About this image” text for each observation? Also, changing my profile image has been a bit hit-and-miss but haven’t tried again today yet so maybe that was just an issue yesterday.
Thanks, Mike
Wow Dominic – What a transformation! Well done!
I couldn’t believe it when I started playing with what is now searchable. Several tens of thousands of comet images for instance. I had been planning on researching Comet 29P coma morphologies over the years’ of observations but have kept putting it off because of the laborious prospect. Now, in principle, anyone can trawl the Comet Section archive and get involved in that type of study. People may be willing to volunteer to measure images as part of a team effort since these image data are now available and downloadable to all members.
A few glitches. In another tab right now I have https://britastro.org/observations/user.php open. It shows me “Showing images 1 to 40 of 8972” rather than just my own uploaded images. Curiously enough, when I first went there after logging on it did as I expected.Although it is clear how to filter by object name, it is not at all apparent to me on how to search by username.
Next was an attempt to find my Barnard’s star upload to see whether animated GIFs work. Setting the search to “Stars” and Library to “Member Images” resulted in a different set being displayed, some of which were tagged as stars. The majority (an image of the “Copernicus area” for instance) did not. Adding “Barnard’s Star” into the object box did not change the results found.
Logging out and logging in again fixed the first problem. I then went to the Barnard’s Star image and found that the animated GIF now works perfectly. Brilliant! However, the comment is now incorrect but if I try to remove it an error response is given
I seem to remember commenting on
https://britastro.org/observations/observation.php?id=20201122_230000_68e4171212c0b467
and Martina responding to my comment. Neither comments appear to have survived the transition to the new regime.
No big deal but perhaps it is indicative of something that might be?
OTOH, perhaps advancing senility has damaged my memory.
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