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.
Hi,
Yesterday I used my new ALTAIR Hypercam 183C for the first time (SONY IMX183C sensor). I took 40 frames à 120sec with my 8" F/4 Newton on NGC 925. After that 25 Flats, 20 darks and 100 Bias.
Since the FITS files from SG Pro are with RGGB Bayer pattern, I enabled "Force CFA". But then a few questions came up:
1) When creating Master Darks and Master Bias, do I have to enable "Force CFA"? As far a I know Master Dark and Bias Frames should be subtracted from the lights before the bayer pattern is applied to the lights (at least that was the workflow in the software 'Fitswork').
2) When creating Master Flat, I do have to enable "Force CFA" otherwise it comes later - when dividing through the Flats - to a "number of channels do not match" error, right?
3) I have oversampled data (1px ~ 0,6") - can I do something to improve my result (e.g. Bayer Drizzle?)
Thanks, Stephan
Hi Stephan,
When I process images from my OSC camera, I select force CFA for everything, and also set the Bayer pattern in the drop down. My camera uses the Panasonic chip which has a different pattern than the default. Employing "set it and forget about it" for the CFA has worked quite well for me.
Hi Stephan,
1)Yes, you should enable force CFA and set the correct CFA pattern, when you create the calibration frames. The reason being, it will enable APP to set this information into the metadata of the masterframes. The calibration frames will then be recognised as CFA master frames. So the master frames themselves are CFA frames and calibration of your lights will only be done on the cfa pixels like it should 😉 Debayering of your calibrated cfa pixels in your lights will then be done automatically after calibration like it should as well.
2)Yes, if you don't indicate it's cfa data, the assumption will be that the flats are monochrome. And you can't do this on auto, since the application should then guess the cfa pattern. Unfortunately, SGP doesn't supply the cfa info in the fits frames metadata (yet?), otherwise I could directly use it ;-).
3) Sure, but over-sampling is only one of the requirements to benefit from drizzle. You would need dithering and plenty of data as well. Drizzle is a strong noise injector so it's not always to be advised. In 6) you can set the integration to drizzle or bayer drizzle. In case of bayer drizzle, leave the scale at 1.0 and use drizzle drops of 2-3 pixels with a tophat kernel 😉 . 2x drizzle is setting the scale to 2x and using droplets of 0.5 - 1 pixel. Smaller droplets means sharper results, more noise. Drizzle is always about sharpness versus noise.
Kind regards,
Mabula
Thank you both, for your answers. Since I dither with SGPro and go for many short-integrated frames, and do have oversampled data, I'll try dither the next time. 🙂
Thanks, Stephan
