Mar 28 2026 APP 2.0.0-beta40 will be released in 7 days.
It did take a long time to have the work finished on this and it will have a major performance boost of 30-50% over 2.0.0-beta39 from calibration to integration. We extensively optimized many critical parts of APP. All has been tested to guarantee correct optimizations. Drizzle and image resampling is much faster for instance, those modules have been completely rewritten. Much less memory usage. LNC 2.0 will be released which works much better and faster than LNC in it's current state. And more, all will be added to the release notes in the coming weeks...
Update on the 2.0.0 release & the full manual
We are getting close to the 2.0.0 stable release and the full manual. The manual will soon become available on the website and also in PDF format. Both versions will be identical and once released, will start to follow the APP release cycle and thus will stay up-to-date to the latest APP version.
Once 2.0.0 is released, the price for APP will increase. Owner's license holders will not need to pay an upgrade fee to use 2.0.0, neither do Renter's license holders.
Attached is a stack of 55 images of comet C/2019 L3 ATLAS from two nights ago.
I used 1-star registration, and also local normalized rejection during integration.
Note that the faintest background stars are trailed, which makes sense because the 1-star registration data showed that the comet drifted about five pixels (in the X direction, zero rate in Y direction) during the imaging run. But the brighter stars are not trailed at all.
I presume this is a feature of local normalized rejection?...it is only invoked above a certain threshold that is defined by the local background level?
Anyway, I just wanted to share this result. (When I first looked at the image I knew something was different, but it took me a bit of time to realize the difference in bright/faint stars that did/didn't trail.)
But the brighter stars are not trailed at all.
It is difficult to see with such a strongly compressed image, but the bright stars are trailed as well. Compared to the displayed size of the stars, however, the trailing of the bright stars is much less noticeable than that of the faint stars.
