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 have a trial license and after integrating half of my final image was blocked by a grey area. Is this due to it being a trial license? If so how can I fix it.
Meaning if this is caused by something other than it being a trial license, what could it be and how can I fix it.
Hi Robert @hank-bobo,
Thank you very much for posting your issue and welcome to the APP forum !
The Trial license provides a 100% working APP version, so everything works the same as with a paid license. Your issue must be caused be 1 or more bad frames that actually have no data but show that grey area. I recently saw this with several frames of the Celestron Origin telescope actually. You need to browse through your images and find the problem frames and delete them.
After 3) Analyse stars, you can probably see from the frame list, which are the bad frame or frames. They will have a low star count or very different values than the other frames. With the right mouse button over the frame list, you can delete the problem frames.
Let me know if this helps.
Mabula
@mabula-admin would this issue only be caused by the light frames?
I noticed my dark flat frames are oriented differently than the rest of my frames. They are 4000x6000 instead of the other way around like all my other frames.
@mabula-admin would this issue only be caused by the light frames?
I think it can be caused by any frame actually, so also by your calibration frames. I would first check your lights though.
I noticed my dark flat frames are oriented differently than the rest of my frames. They are 4000x6000 instead of the other way around like all my other frames.
That is weird yes, what capture software or hardware are you using to make your images? It could be an orientation setting in the software or hardware that captures your frames.
@mabula-admin I took out the dark flat frames from the integration and the problem was fixed. I used the same hardware as my other frames. A Nikon d3300 with a coma corrector on a skywatcher 300p on an alt-az mount. I will look into getting the dark flat frames oriented in the correct way and try again. Thanks for your help!
Does the camera have some sort of auto-rotate feature? I think I have heard of that before being an issue sometimes.
@vincent-mod while taking the dark flat frames I think camera may have been angled in such a way that it automatically rotated the images.
Hi Robert @hank-bobo,
Okay, thank you for the feedback. So the problem was solved with leaving out the flatdarks, right? This must mean that that artifact is in one or more of your flat darks. The camera probably made an error while saving the frame in the camera. That can occur and it would like your issue in fact.
The rotation of the images is not the cause at all. The orientation is metadata that APP will ignore when loading those frames to create calibration masters and to calibrate the light frames. That orientation tag on the frame causes it to show oriented differently in normal photography software and you can see it in APP as well if you enable orientation above the image viewer, but it has zero effect on how the images are processed 😉 So my advice is to double check each of those flat darks and then you will fine one with this banding artifact. Delete it, and then reprocess with all the flat darks left and all should be okay.
Mabula
