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 took a series of intentionally defocused (wide field) images in order to better show star colors. (Tiny dots, especially faint ones, do not convey color information well. Larger dots convey color information better.)
The blur circles were about 40 - 50 pixels in diameter (after 2x2 binning).
That proved to be a challenging/weird data set for Astro Pixel Processor. Analyze stars? Register images? Calibrate background? That was all impossible.
But removing light pollution/gradients seemed to work well. (And for a wide angle image, that's important.)
Here is the result from stacking with no registration.
After correcting light pollution/gradients:
(Note that I did important post processing in GIMP. My goal was to compress/flatten brightness differences so that colors of faint stars could be better shown. I did this by boosting lightness in HSL color space, then going back into RGB color space to darken the sky background.)
This is not meant to be a scientific analysis/display of star color. It's a crude attempt at showing relative color differences, especially for fainter stars.
If you want the set of raw images for APP testing, just ask. (I understand if you don't want to improve star analysis/registration of images that are intentionally defocused. This is not a typical way to do astrophotography.)
I like it, looking at your data, collecting it in a different way sometimes, that can be very interesting. Thanks for sharing!
