2026-10-09 APP 2.0.0-beta48 has been released !
This is mainly a bug fix release for the reported bugs in beta47. In addition it has a significant User Interface performance improvement noticable when you need to process 1000s of images in APP.
2026-10-03 APP 2.0.0-beta47 has been released !
This is a very big release... many code optimizations/rewrites, many parts of APP are much faster and more precise, especially star analysis and registration are much faster ! Big mosaics will go much faster 🙂
And we introduce a new preview filter, which includes the new Adaptive Deep Sky Stretch and a General Levels Stretch, this has been long over due. The old preview filter (the panel on the right side to stretch and preview your data) has not been updated for a couple of years and it is a critical part of any APP session.
Adaptive Deep Sky Stretch or ADSS is a much more intuitive stretch algorithm. It is also color preserving (which is a great new addition in itself ! ) which means that the highlights are no longer bleached, color is maintained from the linear data while stretching. You can simply stretch your data using the sky background level and signal width sliders which work much easier and more intuitive. You no longer need to fiddle with the old complicated sliders with zoom buttons. All the zoom buttons for the sliders are made redundant. And you can enter slider values in the slider value fields yourself. I will make a youtube video in the coming days to explain and fully introduce ADSS. Once the video is ready, it will be highlighted on the forum.
RGB Combine upgrade !. The RGB Combine Tool has been rewritten mostly. The tool is faster and easier to use and most importantly, the Luminance slider to inject a luminance channel or channels into the RGB composite is now working correctly. It no longer bleaches the RGB colors. Combined with the new ADSS preview, you will get much better and easier great composites with great color! I will also explain this in a new youtube video.
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Topic starter
May 21, 2018 20:49
Using the new multisession/multifilter functionality in APP 1.061 I finally did what I hadn't found the courage to do before - while testing my transportable setup (a 15cm Fotonewton on Celestron Advanced VX mount) I took a lot of data on Messier 101 - mostly from home, but in the end also one night at an Astronomical gathering in the Belgian Ardennes ("RACA" in Neufchateau) where the skies are far better than at home.
Using the new multisession/multifilter functionality in APP 1.061 I finally did what I hadn't found the courage to do before - while testing my transportable setup (a 15cm Fotonewton on Celestron Advanced VX mount) I took a lot of data on Messier 101 - mostly from home, but in the end also one night at an Astronomical gathering in the Belgian Ardennes ("RACA" in Neufchateau) where the skies are far better than at home.
This gave me 450+ individual light frames in Red,Green, Blue, Luminance and Hydrogen-alfa across 5 different nights, under varying conditions and with the camera rotated 180° half the time - plus a few hundred assorted darks, flats and flatdarks.
I threw everything into APP, divided into sensible sets (the darks were globally valid, but some different nights required different sets of flat/flatdarks) and ran with it.
In the end, it spit out 5 frames, L, R,G,B and H-alfa - I then restacked L + R + G + B as a single master luminance (using "SNR" to provide the stacking ratio) , then I did an LRGB color combine and an HaLRGB color combine, balanced out the star colours and output DDP'd TIFF files into Photoshop.
The main postprocessing (denoising, contrast enhancements) was done on the LRGB, I only recovered some H-alfa to slightly push the H-alfa regions in M101
The end result is clearly superior to any of the processings I did on just a subset of data before, and the effort required was far far smaller thanks to the multisession/multifilter support - thanks Mabula!
Oh, and the image? Check it out at https://flic.kr/p/27ozWqV
The previous attempts can be seen at:
9h HaLRGB : https://flic.kr/p/25Sb7RJ
5h LRGB : https://flic.kr/p/JNe6N3
Mabula-Admin reacted
May 22, 2018 12:35
Hi Bart @bdeclerc,
Excellent, the final result looks very nice and I look the amount of H-alpha blending, it shows the active regions well in the galaxy.
Perhaps the overall colors could be a bit more reddish, so the core of M101 becomes somewhat more yellow, but I think this is very close already 😉
If you create a super-luminace form the L,R,G,B channels I would advise against using SNR for integration weights. SNR is a pretty unreliable metric due to deviating gradients between your imaging sessions. Images with bad transparancy and out-of focus images can also become false positives when you use SNR as weights. I would rather go for star shape weights, that will give you the sharpest super luminance. Or use quality weights to have a superluminance optimized for sharpness, noise and stardensity (so good transparancy/seeing) combined.
Thanks a lot for sharing 😉
Cheers,
Mabula
