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.
Hello!
I just downloaded the trial of APP and I have no idea what I'm doing. I was pointed toward this program by a friend, but all I have is a set of nine 30 second exposures of the night sky. All I'm trying to do (for now, until I learn more) is align/warp/whatever the images to reduce noise.
This program seems so powerful, I feel like it should be fairly easy to do? But it's asking me to load lights and darks and flats and I have no idea what any of that means.
Please help
Thank you
Have a quick look at some of the videos, linked on the top bar above. Maybe the Sara Wager ones, there are a few "How to" videos.... That's possibly the easiest way.
I tried watching a few of them, but every video seems to assume I have any idea what a "calibration frame" is. I also don't understand what a light frame is vs a dark frame vs a flat frame?
Again, I just have a group of pictures of the general sky from my backyard that I'm trying to align properly.
I think it will be very good to have an understanding of those first, here's a random post I found with answers explaining it as well: https://stargazerslounge.com/topic/252760-lights-darks-flats-bias/
APP itself is a rather advanced package to take this kind of data and correct for all the different issues there may be in the photo's you took and to carefully and correctly make them work together. You need proper workflows to create those calibration data properly.
