June 24 2026 APP 2.0.0-beta46 has been released !
Improved internal memory configuration (lower ! memory usage), fixed beta45 startup issue, fixed Set Save Directory & 2-panel mosaics.
May 27 2026 APP 2.0.0-beta45 has been released !
Fully Multi-Threaded LNC, many improvements for the registration engine, platform upgrade, and further tuning of internal memory consumption and memory release back to OS.
Apr 14 2026: Google Pay, Apple Pay & WeChat Pay added as payment options
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.
I managed to eke out almost four hours of narrowband data on the West Veil last night -- it positioned itself to slide right down the narrow arc of sky visible from my back yard. I was in bed asleep before 11:30! This morning I took the data through bog-simple, default-everything one-click integration in APP, ran the channels through the light pollution tool, combined with HSO 2, calibrated background, and saved the result. Ran that through starnet++ to remove stars, ran the starless image through Topaz Denoise to denoise and sharpen a little, and then off to Photoshop. Still have a backfocus problem, leading to terrible stars in the corners of the original image (e.g., the lower right here). Still, I'm pretty happy.
I left the rig set up and am collecting data on the East Veil as I type. I completely forgot to try APP's star-reducer on last night's data, but will on the East Veil tomorrow.
 Tech deets on Astrobin.
That is looking really nice! Slightly grainy in the signal maybe, is that due to topaz maybe?
Maybe? I tried to be super-gentle on the Topaz sliders. My 183 does tend to produce a lot of visible noise, some of which is visible even after integrating 4 hours of data. These are super-mega-blowups of the 52 Cyg region. From the left, the stretched output from APP, the output from starnet++ removal, and output from Topaz. The last definitely loses a bit of detail-defining contrast, which I stretched back into being in Photoshop, doubtless amplifying the remaining noise.
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Nice analysis! In the middle I do see artefacts in the bright star, so maybe the settings in starnet need some adjustment?
Probably. I'm running the command-line Python version, which doesn't exactly make it obvious, nor does it encourage experimentation.
