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've just bought my first cooled astrocam, an ASI2600MC and the first thing I am doing right now are the calibration frames: Bias and Darks at -15°C and a BadPixelMap. However, I am doing the BPM at Roomtemperature and long subs like 5min. According to Sara Wager this is temperature inpedependant and exposure length as well.
Is this correct?
I will use these three calibration files on all sessions and the only calibration frame I will reshoot every night is flats.
is this ok to do?
@digitaliz-se Stefan, with this camera there is no need to go to -15°. The dark noise is so low that 0° or -5° is cold enough. Several users have indicated on the ZWO forum that cooling so deeply heats up the peltier cooling element so much that the glue of the sensor melts so be very careful there!
Having said that, yes room temperature if great. Bad pixel maps are temperature independent. Just make sure to not use those hot darks and bias for actual image processing and only for creating the bad pixel map.
Thanks, then I'll use -10°C just to be safe. I can use that temperature the entire season then.
What am I going to do with the BPM if I am not going to use it when stacking?
Ahh you meant darks and bias from making the BPM when stacking my real images? Nah, Im gonna use the -10°C bias and darks 🙂
/stefan
I do BPM for each set of darks: so for each master dark I have its own BPM matching exactly the entire set of darks from which it has been created...
But I think that too noisy BPM can affect my data and correct them too much.
Indeed, if I load exactly a BPM with the same settings as darks and lights, maybe the correction and calibration of all my lights occur really in an accurate way...
Am I wrong? Am I misunderstanding anything?
Partly yes, a BPM will not overcorrect your data, this is the strength of it. You can use a BPM, created from a noisy dark, for your sensor for a long time. And for all data.
