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.
Open clusters may not be the sexiest of deep space objects, but this image is notable because I had given up on it a couple of months ago. The brighter stars had prominent red fringes on one side and blue on the other, and the large red stars had ugly dark red arcs, about 1/3 of the circumference and inside the envelope of the star.
With APP 1.060, not only was the processing much easier - load all R, G, and B frames and go - but by using the "align channels" option in Calibrate, the fringing was significantly reduced to the point where I felt I ended up with a usable image.
This was just over 3 hours of data taken 11/25/18 with a Skywatcher Esprit 120, an ASI1600MM Cool, a Paramount MyT mount, and Astrodon gen 2 LRGB filters. I ended up tossing the L frames because they made the red arcs worse - uneven saturation of the stars?
Post-processing was done in PI.
Full size image on Astrobin
Congrats Mabula on an excellent release!
Great image Rowland @rowland-f-archer-jr,
With APP 1.060, not only was the processing much easier - load all R, G, and B frames and go - but by using the "align channels" option in Calibrate, the fringing was significantly reduced to the point where I felt I ended up with a usable image.
Excellent, yes, the align channels function in calibration will reduce all sorts of chromatic aberration to a high degree 😉 In the console panel, you can find how much the alignment between the R,G,B is changed. I intend to include this in the metadata as well of the calibrated images.
This was just over 3 hours of data taken 11/25/18 with a Skywatcher Esprit 120, an ASI1600MM Cool, a Paramount MyT mount, and Astrodon gen 2 LRGB filters. I ended up tossing the L frames because they made the red arcs worse - uneven saturation of the stars?
If you get ugly results on the stars when you apply the L, this usually means that the star size and shape between the L data and the "other" data deviates quite a bit. A way to solve that is to not apply the L data 100% to luminance, but perhaps only 50-75%. Then the remaining luminance of 50-25% will still come from the "other" data. That will usually fix your stars and will still give you some benefit of L data with probably better SNR.
Thanks for sharing,
Mabula
