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.
I was creating some new master flats and chose "Automatic" as the integration method. I loaded 30 subs, yet APP still used median as the integration method when I read the output from the console as it was working. This is in contrast to what I've always read that if you have more than 20 subs you should choose average.
Is this correct behavior?
Yes indeed, that is correct behaviour.
For masterflat creation, the automatic integration will always use median integration. Reason being that it prevents a lot of issues with flatpanels 😉 and/or short exposed flats. Simply said, to get a proper masterflat, in most cases, median integration of your flats is much more robust for good flat-field calibration.
And yes, for bias, darks/darkflats, lights you definitely want to use average over median with more than 20 frames. Reason being that average integration is superior to median integration when it comes to noise reduction, and that fact... is almost never a problem with MasterFlats. The Signal to Noise Ratio is already very good of single flats, let alone of a MasterFlat.
So the rule does not apply really for flats. If you have good stable flats, then by all means integrate with average if you wish, but it will very likely not affect the noise levels in your final light frame integrations significantly.
Kind regards,
Mabula
Excellent. Thank you so much for that quick reply.
