Mar 28 2026 APP 2.0.0-beta40 will be released in 7 days.
It did take a long time to have the work finished on this and it will have a major performance boost of 30-50% over 2.0.0-beta39 from calibration to integration. We extensively optimized many critical parts of APP. All has been tested to guarantee correct optimizations. Drizzle and image resampling is much faster for instance, those modules have been completely rewritten. Much less memory usage. LNC 2.0 will be released which works much better and faster than LNC in it's current state. And more, all will be added to the release notes in the coming weeks...
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.
Deep Sky Stacker correctly interprets my QHY163M data as greyscale. But APP is interpreting it as CFA and giving terribly grainy stacks. How do I get it to read correctly? This is a new problem. I did not have it when processing data from the same camera before. All of the images are .fit images captured with APT.
Well, I figured out a workaround. I opened all of the image files in another program and resaved them. Now APP sees them as greyscale files. Weird huh?
I guess that the data you have saved from the camera (via particular software) doesn't include the correct tag in the header of the file. DSS may use some standard way to the revert to grayscale, I don't know, but that would make sense. If you then save it via a different program that does add a tag, APP will correctly see this. If that's the case, my advice would be to let the makers of your capture software know this would be nice to add as APP is not assuming anything if it doesn't know from the data.
Robert, in tab 0 you can select "no interpolation" so APP interprets your data as mono data instead of color.
Actually, I tried 'no interpolation' too, but it didn't work on this data set for some reason. I found the workaround by accident when I opened and rotated a few of the subs with Nebulosity. I noticed afterward that it wiped many of the header tags and that restored the proper greyscale. I will have to check the Astro Photo Tool to see why this happened.
@rapollock Did you check the FITS headers if the raw subs to see if a Bayer matrix FITS header item with the value "RGGB" or something similar is present? If yes then you may need to check APT for how to avoid writing that FITS header to the raw files.
Also, I forgot to mention that you need to tick "force Bayer/X-Trans CFA" as well to make sure that APP uses the selected pattern (even if in this case it means that APP should NOT force the debayering).
Ah, I would not have thought of the latter, but it makes sense. Thanks.
