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.
Hi all - posted a few days ago about getting a Xeon based ex-server machine for processing - but am now looking at the route of building my own machine to spec. The thing is most builder websites or you tubers are creating gaming pcs or workstations. I've no idea what to get or what to build for an astronomy number cruncher. A core I9 12th Gen or AMD xxxx series with 128gb of ram is going to process in no time but will cost the Earth. Does anyone have any examples of scalable system builds for APP/Photoshop processing - ie start with 32gb RAM and build up - add more drives later etc. Is a good graphics card important?? I'm utterly confused.
thanks for any help!
I would probably go for 64GB of memory, is there a real use case that you would require 128? Are you planning large mosaics for example? If not, you can turn that down a bit.
Most desktops you built yourself can be configured as you like, so you could built a system that has 32GB of memory and if you have a motherboard that has more space and support for more, you can add extra modules yourself in the future. The new CPU's from Intel are quite nice, again if they have more cores I would pick that one (it's always stated with those cpu's in the spec sheet). A graphics card is not very important yet, support for that is complicated and will be in a future APP version. So you can get a decent one, but don't break the bank on that. Normally you can also upgrade to a faster one, later on. That's the nice thing with self assembled computers.
But I unfortunately can't help you further with that as we really have to focus on the software side on the forum. My advice would be to get someone local that has experience building computers and make it that way. If a computer is built for gaming or not really doesn't matter much. The only real difference there is that they'll probably have a more expensive GPU and less focus on more cores on the CPU. For APP, more cores is better, memory is great to have and get M.2 SSD drives for processing (one of 2TB for processing and 1 smaller one for the OS).
No ... thank you! This has been more than enough information - every build I have seen has been from a gaming perspective or server use. I just needed to know what kit to buy to build my own, but it was like buying car parts for Rally driving when everyone either has you tube videos for Formula 1 or every day driving. So this has helped a lot! Thank you!
🙂
