Picastro - Social Media for Astronomy.

In 2022, I had an idea. Actually, I have several ideas on a regular basis, but that's for another day.

I had been using social media for a few years to share my astronomy and astrophotography journey, and I always heard and seen people saying the same thing about regular social media platforms like Instagram etc — how much they were annoyed with such platforms, because their hard fought photons were being crushed by compression methods and these platforms only cared about serving ads to sell us stuff. Everyday was, and is, a constant battle with adverts, fake accounts, bots and spammy stuff. All we want to do is admire and share our amazing images of space with people who only want to see amazing images of space.

And, more recently, it has started to get progressively worse, with the explosion of AI being used to generate fake images of deep sky objects pretending to be real. AI images most definitely are not real space images. Of course, one problem being that the average person who isn't used to seeing real images of space, thinks that these AI generated images are real.

So, I decided that maybe it was time to create a dedicated app for sharing astrophotography images for iOS and Android, that allowed people like me to share their images, distraction free, wrapped up in a beautifully simple and user friendly user experience and in the original size and resolution that those images were saved in. So, as a community, we could share and learn from each other in a safe place for sharing space images and 'stuff'. Hence, Picastro - social media for astro.

Sure, there are a few other places available to post astronomical photographic images, but none of these were focused on a beautifully simple, easy to use dedicated app only for astro. Don't get me wrong, I use some of these other platforms too, but those other platforms were not hugely mobile friendly and they certainly didn't have a dedicated app available to me that allowed me to share only astronomy and astrophotography images in a social media environment, especially when I had just started out. They felt too complex and overpowering. For someone like me at the start of my journey of taking space images, I need a simple, easy to use place to share my journey, and it didn't exist... until now.

So, in 2022, I set about planning and designing a dedicated app for space images and content — to give all of us astronerds a place to share our own journey to the cosmos and beyond, no matter what stage of our cosmic adventure.

I started in stealth mode, planned and designed some prototypes, tested the UX and UI with a group of users who would be using it the most, and it was overwhelmingly received with open arms and positivity. What a relief that was!

I made the decision to start on the road to building this dedicated app for spacenerds and bring it to everyone. It was a tough task, that's for sure. Lots of learning and lots of mistakes.

By 2024 I had a small team in place and we were working to make this the best space app possible.

By September 2024 it was ready for launch, fully bug tested, alpha and beta tested and raring to go! Thanks goes out to all the beta testers who put the app through its paces.

I have learned so much during this process and I am looking forward to the future of this app, to make it the best and most innovative app it can be for the astro community.

Thank you all for your unwavering support over the last couple of years.

Thanks for reading this. Typos now fixed! ;-)

T