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.
very well.
That's great to hear! 🙂
I'm testing Beta 17 on Linux Mint 21.1 and it runs really great.
I'm using dual CPU EPYC 7601 CPU's with 256GB of RAM and NVME 8TB stripped RAID 0, 16 TB Stripped 6GB SATA and 8 TB stripped 6 GB SATA storage. I've experienced no stability issues at all and will continue to test. The registration of my old data was problematic using PixInsight however, APP tore through the registration with no issues. I have an 80TB Synology DS918+ running SHR2 to mitigate data safety (which is also backed up to external storage).
I like that capability to leverage my old data sets- so a big well done to the developers.
I'm waiting for the latest stable release where I hope I will be able to save progress as I integrate many thousands of files using this platform so its very time consuming to feed the required data sets if I need to restart the computer.
Hi Mark @contactdeepskyconnect-uk,
That is really great to know, thank you very much for your feedback, that is highly appreciated !
Yes, project save/load is coming 😉
Mabula
I spotted a small issue that seemed to have a big impact. The automated log stopped running at time stamp 11:33 - please see the screenshot. I thought I could just kill it & it would restart. I pressed the close button- the window did not close however the performance of the integration improved dramatically. Did this process crash & drag the whole interface down- it seemed to get better after the attempted closure of the window even though it looked like nothing happened.
I'd be interested to try & understand what happened.
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Hi Mark @contactdeepskyconnect-uk,
This is a new one for me, the separate console should definitely not be any bottleneck for processing. I have not experienced that it would nor that it would stop like in your case. A clean removal of the process console is done with the CFG button. Simple disable the console output there. You can not disable it with the window close icon, it does nothing actually.
To make sure that it is not a bottleneck, I will do some benchmarks with the console enabled/disabled. If I see a noticable difference in performance I will have a good look to fix that unwanted behaviour.
Mabula
Hi Mabula,
Thank you for your reply. I've not seen this issue again despite a lot of re-testing. It may have been something I did whilst I was learning the system. I would not worry too much about the issue as it would only be a problem if I saw it multiple times. Coincidentally I have just had a failure on one of the SATA disks in the RAID configuration that I was using for the output files to be generated as file copies- this could be connected. I will continue to monitor & feedback anything that is of concern.
Thank you again for your kind attention.
Best wishes
Mark
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Hi Mark @contactdeepskyconnect-uk,
Again, that is good to know 😉 thanks for your feedback. Just to be sure, i performed a benchmark with the about to be release 2.0.0-beta20 with the general console open and closed and I see no difference in performance 🙂 which is good to know as well !
Mabula
