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've been playing with APP for under a week, learning from video tutorials etc. After running tab 3. Analyse Stars I checked the chosen reference image and saw it was very poor - massive star trailing compared to all the other frames - so not sure why that was selected as the Ref. Also I tried right clicking and selecting create analytic graph but nothing showed up. Also the sorting by certain columns doesn't appear to work.
This is indeed a bit strange, also as the FWHM values are higher then other frames (which makes sense given the trails). Is this with the latest version of APP? And did you see this with other data sets as well?
Hi Vincent thanks for replying. I tried with a different set and the image with highest quality was chosen as reference so that worked. Â
I did notice another issue in registration on the new dataset where red was slightly displaced so will investigate.
Not sure why the graph doesn't work though.
I think I know why the chosen image counted as reference image. it appears the frame has double star images across whole frame (must have suffered a knock) - so presumably star density metric doubled!
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