Apr 9 2026 APP 2.0.0-beta40 has been released !
It has a major performance boost of 30-50% over 2.0.0-beta39 from calibration to integration, for mosaics even faster! 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. Improved Outlier Rejection with LN 2.0 rejection. macOS CMD+A works now in file chooser ! And more, all will be added to the release notes in the coming hours...
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 Mabula
I was out last night trying to get some subs of IC 1396 (I only managed 4 before high level clouds ruined the rest), but then when I came to do my Flats it suddenly dawned on me that I wasn’t exactly sure how to take proper flats when doing Narrowband on a DSLR. So maybe you can answer this one for me, based on what APP requires for proper calibration for this type of imaging.
So I took 2 different sets of flats, as I wasn’t sure which was the correct type. I used a great little simple program called FastOne for quickly viewing the Raw files as they came out. The 1st bunch of Flats I took had a short exposure of <1 sec, and these produced a well-exposed Red Channel, but the ‘Luminosity’ Channel in FastOne showed as being under-exposed. The images looked grey in SGPro. The 2nd bunch of Flats I took had a much longer exposure of around 9 secs, and these showed a well-exposed ‘Luminosity’ Channel but a massively over-exposed Red Channel in FastOne. These ones looked white in SGPro. I'm at work at the moment, but let me know if you need to see screen grabs, I can upload them later if the description above isn't clear.
So I’m wondering which ones are the ‘correct’ level of Flats exposure when using one of your NB algorithms in APP. I have a feeling it might be the 2nd type (i.e the much longer exposures) as SGPro showed the Mean ADU as being a little over 8000, which is in the middle region for my 14bit Nikon D5300a, but I was a bit nervous just in case I end up taking all my flats the wrong way.
Thanks in advance!
Hi Xiga,
The frames are calibrated before the debayer algorithms are applied. So in that sense, these narrowband OSC frames have the same guidelines as regular OSC frames. But since not all channels will be used after the debayer process, it's best to follow the following guidelines.
H-alpha debayer - make sure the red channel is well illuminated and not saturated
OIII - make sure both green and blue are well illuminated and not saturated
SII, same as H-alpha, keep the red channel under control.
Let me know if this helps 😉
Mabula
Hi Xiga,
The frames are calibrated before the debayer algorithms are applied. So in that sense, these narrowband OSC frames have the same guidelines as regular OSC frames. But since not all channels will be used after the debayer process, it's best to follow the following guidelines.
H-alpha debayer - make sure the red channel is well illuminated and not saturated
OIII - make sure both green and blue are well illuminated and not saturated
SII, same as H-alpha, keep the red channel under control.
Let me know if this helps 😉
Mabula
Couldn't be clearer. Thanks Mabula! 🙂
