UPDATE FROM MABULA
I have had a very rough 2 months unfortunately health wise. I was struck 3x in a row with bacterial infections. The second infection occurred  after a routine hospital checkup and I became very sick. I had to rest and take a lot of antibiotics. Once I was recovering and restarting work 1 month ago, I again became sick. The infection was not yet gone, so even more antibiotics and rest was needed. Needless to say, it took a lot of my energy and I needed a lot of rest.
Finally, the infection is really gone and my energy is coming back step-by-step now and I have started work again. I am terribly sorry to have kept you waiting for support. I will address all outstanding questions and e-mails step-by step and will be on the forum daily from today.
APP 2.0.0-beta47 will come soon as well, a lot of work was already completed before I became very ill, so the release is also nearly ready for you. Beta47 will be much faster actually. Many workflows will be more than 2x faster, mosaics can even be 10x faster than before because registration really received a major boost... all compared to beta46. Â Before I release it, I will make sure that everything is working properly and then I will release it.
Hi,
Just a crazy feature request for us Alt/Az imagers. Â Over an imaging session I get a lot of field rotation and, with short subs, a lot of frames. Â Earlier it was suggested that I split my stacking up into chunks (say 8 stacks, each using 1/8th of the frames) and then stack the results of the outputs. Â This worked great because each sub stack only had some field rotation, not too much and data handling by the program was much better... it was just faster.
So a possible future feature: Â In the integration allow a "Stack as X sub stacks" feature that then just divides the total "N" lights up in X sets, each using N/X subs, and goes off and stacks each one and saving the unstretched result. Â This would save me doing all this manually.
I think more and more people will be using low cost Alt/Az scopes for imaging because with modern low read noise CMOS cameras and modern computers, it can produce very nice results... but you shoot short exposures (lots of frames) and have field rotation (very large final output frames), and dividing it up automatically eliminates the risk of attempting one giant mega stacking. Â It would make APP the goto stacker for Alt/Az systems like mine.
Also, now that it's getting closer to Christmas :-), I'll add one more related feature to my Santa list: Â In the integration option to crop to the reference frame, for rotated fields, the reference frame isn't always the perfect one, so if you could have a "reference + 10% or +20% border" sized area for integration, it would still avoid a massive field rotation/field drift explosion in integration field size but would provide some extra border region to integrate into, some of which can be cropped later once it's clear what is high quality and what isn't.
Just a thought... I'm sure you have a zillion other features more important.
Hi Steven,
It's always great to hear about feature requests, so no problem! 🙂 This one wouldn't be high on the list I think as I'm not sure many photographers go for Alt/Az, especially because of the issue of field rotation. Stacking subsets automatically, it may be interesting but only for this specific case and not very hard to perform manually right?
