Getting a reproducible hard crash in beta41 on my Sony A7 IV .ARW files. JVM aborts and the window just disappears. Wanted to flag it here in addition to the email I sent to support (with the .ips files attached).

Setup: macOS 26.4.1, Apple Silicon (MacBook Pro 18,3), APP 2.0.0-beta41 on GraalVM 24.0.1+9.1. Shot on Sony A7 IV, 14-bit ARW, ISO 8000, 4 s subs. 51 lights / 15 darks / 16 flats of comet C/2025 R3 (PanSTARRS).

What I've tried:

• Full set (lights + darks + flats), defaults on 2) CALIBRATE → "create Masters & assign to Lights" → crash every time, 5-10 s in.
• Lights-only (no darks/flats). Got past master generation / assign a couple of times, but then crashed at 3) ANALYSE STARS instead. Same signature.
• RAM slider at default (512 MB) and at max — same crash either way, so it doesn't look memory-related.
• Cmd+Q and relaunch between attempts.

Crash signature (from the .ips):

• Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGABRT)
• Exception Subtype: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x0000000000008188
• Triggered by Thread 75 (Java: pool-91-thread-1)
• Crashing frame: arm_libRawConverter.jnilib Java_com_ariesproductions_rawConversion_LibRawConverter_getRawData + 344

The crash is in the native raw decoder (getRawData), and the fact that it also crashes at analyse-stars with lights-only lines up — star analysis re-reads each light through the same decoder. Looks like a null-pointer deref at a small struct offset (0x8188), which feels like a header/metadata parsing issue specific to these ARWs.

Anyone else seeing this? Happy to send sample .ARWs if it helps repro.

Thanks, Gwen

I have a question and potential bug (or user error) when attempting to stack comets near dawn, when there are precious few stars peeking through the morning sky.  I imaged the comet Saturday morning April 18 2026.  APP Star Analysis indicated 8-20 stars available depending upon the frame - a very low star count, I know.  When I forged ahead to Registration using Comet mode or Normal mode, it completed 35 of 36 registration tasks and just hung there.  For hours.  In Comet Mode, it never even moved on to selecting the comet nucleus.

Am I doing something incorrect, process-wise?  Is this too few stars for APP to even attempt it?  Or is this a potential software issue?  This may not be the world's best comet data, but I'd like to see what I can make of it.  At the very least, it would be useful to get a warning error if this is something APP cannot complete.  I attach a screen shot and logs.  Thank you for your consideration and keep up the excellent work!

Regards, Martin Jordan 

San Diego, California

What I want it to do is to let you choose HOO, then let you add Ha to Red (and only this), then when you Add Green, prompt you for Oiii, and then when you add Blue, prompt you for OIII.   Or simple just ask you what file for Ha and what file for Oiii, and assigns automatically Ha to Red and Oiii to blue AND green.

Ta

Sometimes I can still interact with the menu and the "cancel" button will works so the program itself hasn't frozen, but it just stops processing. Other times, pressing cancel does nothing and I have to exit the entire program. By doing so, I have to start over adding all of the sessions again. 

This time, pressing cancel (seemingly) did nothing, but I kept it in the background while typing this post, heard the "GONG" in the background and the process had cancelled. Took several minutes from pressing cancel until it actually cancelled. 

Sometimes it goes through fine, usually during the second attempt, but this time I am now at my third. I experienced this with the previous version too (Beta39), but only "now and then". 

Running Widows 11 25H2 ver 8246

64 GB RAM 

AMD Ryzen 9 7950x 16-core 

Usually it integrates 1, maybe 2 frames per second with that setup, until it suddenly stops dead in its tracks and goes several minutes without doing anything. Last time I waited for 10 minutes to see if a background process was catching up, but it was left at 186/506 for all that time. 

Anyone else experienced similar and know of a fix? 

3 hours of 2 min subs, no filter, with QHY268c camera, and Esprit 100 scope on my CEM70 mount, from bortle 6-7 skies

Stacked with no darks, flats or bias, just raw subs, as need to do a new dark library 

in 4) Register (APP 2.0.0 beta41) I get an error message when I try to register 20 subs each with approximately 50-60 stars (pattern recognition set to automatic or triangle):

When pattern recognition set to quadrilaterals it does not finish the job, but no error is given. In order to stop the process I need to click the cancel button.

I tried a 10-subb dataset with more stars and that went fine in beta41.

In 2.0.0 beta38 both datasets go fine.

Nicolàs

• Upgrade development platform to Oracle JDK 26

  JDK 26 has several nice improvements for performance of APP! The garbage collector, the system that frees memory after object allocations, will now instantly free the memory of our images once we no longer need them. Previously, the garbage collector needed still to perform analysis before freeing these large parts of memory. With instant release, performance of APP is definitely improved overall. We will perform some benchmarks, but when running APP, the improvement is very noticeable. Please see this for technical background from Oracle: https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8048180

  Another free improvement of using JDK 26 is more technical, it relates to how the internal garbage collector works. It is described in JEP 522 : https://openjdk.org/jeps/522. Simply put, APP's performance instantly improves another 5-15% is the indication.  We will test performance and show performance difference with the previous version before we release it.

• Image Normalizer is further optimized

  The image normalizer is the module that applies normalization parameters to an image. By optimizing this, performance overall is again increased, especially in 2) Calibrate (flat normalization), 5) Normalize and 6) integrate where images are normalized. OSC/RGB data will have a nice performance gain.

• Fixed ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException in FindBestRegistrationModel 

  As reported here https://www.astropixelprocessor.com/community/main-forum/arrayindexoutofboundsexception-in-findbestregistrationmodel-while-registering/#post-34227 an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException could be thrown when registering in the FindBestRegistrationModel module. The issue will be caused when dynamic distortion correction is enabled. When disabled all works as expected. The issue would manifest if APP tries to calculate distortion correction on data that really does not need it for already perfect registration. The issue is now solved and prevented by simply disabling distortion correction completely in the 2-view registration phase on data that has very little movement in the stars between the images. The user can simply leave distortion correction enabled, internally, APP will disable it for the specific registration task.