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.
I am hoping someone can help, or at least provide me info on how I can determine the issues I have been having with APP after upgrading to the 2.0 BETA.
I am running Ubuntu 20.04, system is updated. I am running a 12 Gen I9 with 128 GIG of memory. I am running the software and processing data that resides on 6T of NVME Gen 4 drives. Graphics card is GForce 3080.
I have done the obvious things like uninstall, reinstall the software, insure I am at correct versions of libs.
The issues i see are APP just stop processing, it will get to about 80% and stall. The other issue is at times, it just hard freezes the machine, and several times it caused the machine to reboot.
The data set that I can constantly get it to fail (Lock up the Linux machine) is 60 frames of NGC7380 that was done over 2 nights. Not even close to the largest data set that I have processed with APP. However, without fail, when I try to process this data from the 2 nights, during integration my machine hard freeze's and requires a reset of the machine.
I can not even say how frustrating this is, and how long it takes or my machine to check drives and restart. I can not find any errors logged. Tonight I will rollback to the version to see if these issues can be reproduced.
Well like anything, ask a question, try a few more things out, and solutions, well at least for the Freezing while processing this data.
I reverted back to the stable version, and it was able to process with no errors, however the final results looks like someone blasted half of it with light. This caused me to go back and examine the frames. What I found was somehow I had half an image, the top half was fine, the bottom half was all white.
I removed this image and reprocessed and once I was happy with results, I installed the BETA 4 and ran the same process without the bad image. I was able to process the data just fine. So, not sure why this half image caused a lockup, but I have the data and if needed I can provide.
