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 recently bought an owner's license and I'm trying to get back to speed. Previously, I used APP for a couple of years on a rental basis; at that time I used it mainly for nighttime sky shots with a Nikon DSLR and, usually, a 50mm or 35mm prime lens.  For the most part, I've used only light frames and gotten good results that way. However, occasionally the output image will have lots of hot pixels among the stars, and I'm not sure what causes that to happen because it seems to be so random.
On a recent occasion when this happened, I added in bias frames and redid the stack, and that completely solved the problem.  But when I tried it again on a different set of exposures, it didn't work.  Is there something up front that I'm doing wrong? For example, am I choosing too high a star count? Â
Sequator, which is probably the best free tool out there, has an option to "merge 4 pixels", and this seems to prevent hot pixels. So naturally I wonder if there's a similar option for APP that I should be using up front.
Best thing to tackle hot pixels is calibrating your lights. Period.
Darks do the best job for me. Bias can help a bit, but will only show hot pixels at higher temperatures (if you are using dslr). As hot pixels always show with higher temperature (long exposure and/or hot weather). Maybe thats why it sometimes doesnt help.
And app offers calibrating with a bad pixel map, use atleast this if you dont want to calibrate with dark frames. If you got a good one you can use this for a couple of month...
You can dither your lights to get hot pixels removed due to outlier rejection. (But if you dont guide or have perfect alignment, that shouldnt be a big issue)
After calibrating my light frames, do I delete the light frames I loaded originally? Â
Do I add in the calibrated lights I just made, or does that happen automatically?
Apologies if these are elementary questions, but with so many files involved in the process, it's not entirely easy to tell by looking at the APP UI.
You can just load your lights and calibration data and then go to tab 6 and press the integrate button, this will go through all steps with standard settings and unless you're doing something special, this should work fine.
You can just load your lights and calibration data and then go to tab 6 and press the integrate button, this will go through all steps with standard settings and unless you're doing something special, this should work fine.
When calibrating the lights, can I usually just take the defaults (i.e., the automatic settings)?  FTR I'm using just a DSLR and usually either a 35mm or 50mm f/1.8 lens, which I usually set to around f/2.2 or f/2.5.
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Yes that is usually fine. Obviously, if it doesn't work out you may have to change a few settings, but with regular and good data this is usually not required.
