For a while now, I’ve been sharing my astrophotography datasets on a really basic mid-90’s-looking site I threw together. It was ugly, it was hard to use, it sucked. But it served its purpose and I was ok with it. I had bigger plans though.
You see, there aren’t a ton of sites that share astrophotography datasets – especially not for free. Many people sell theirs, and the best free options have historically been places like NASA and the ESA. I absolutely love those free resources, but I wanted something for the rest of us and with more variety.
So I’ve spent the past… many many many months working hard to build something new. This was a pain, since I am not a web guy or a software guy and this involved both – and I’m far far from done still – but it is in a place where I’m happy to talk about it and start showing it off.
If you havent yet, head over to check it out: Miscellaneous Datasets. It is fairly filterable by what kind of data you want. All datasets can be downloaded in all the major formats. Right now it is limited to data I’ve personally captured, but I’m hard at work getting more contributors on board. My dream is that someday this will be the largest free non-government dataset resource in the world.