2026-10-09 APP 2.0.0-beta48 has been released !
This is mainly a bug fix release for the reported bugs in beta47. In addition it has a significant User Interface performance improvement noticable when you need to process 1000s of images in APP.
2026-10-03 APP 2.0.0-beta47 has been released !
This is a very big release... many code optimizations/rewrites, many parts of APP are much faster and more precise, especially star analysis and registration are much faster ! Big mosaics will go much faster 🙂
And we introduce a new preview filter, which includes the new Adaptive Deep Sky Stretch and a General Levels Stretch, this has been long over due. The old preview filter (the panel on the right side to stretch and preview your data) has not been updated for a couple of years and it is a critical part of any APP session.
Adaptive Deep Sky Stretch or ADSS is a much more intuitive stretch algorithm. It is also color preserving (which is a great new addition in itself ! ) which means that the highlights are no longer bleached, color is maintained from the linear data while stretching. You can simply stretch your data using the sky background level and signal width sliders which work much easier and more intuitive. You no longer need to fiddle with the old complicated sliders with zoom buttons. All the zoom buttons for the sliders are made redundant. And you can enter slider values in the slider value fields yourself. I will make a youtube video in the coming days to explain and fully introduce ADSS. Once the video is ready, it will be highlighted on the forum.
RGB Combine upgrade !. The RGB Combine Tool has been rewritten mostly. The tool is faster and easier to use and most importantly, the Luminance slider to inject a luminance channel or channels into the RGB composite is now working correctly. It no longer bleaches the RGB colors. Combined with the new ADSS preview, you will get much better and easier great composites with great color! I will also explain this in a new youtube video.
I was stacking a multiple-night project of the Iris Nebula earlier today. Everything looked good, but when I did star removal in Pixinsight, there was this really weird pattern allover the image which kind of looked like IFN, but according to an image-search, I could not find anything similar in other pictures.
Had a closer look at my masters and one of the masterflats looked REALLY weird. Upon closer inspection, I somehow managed to load all the light frames from that session as flats, so that explains the weirdness.I restacked everything using the correct files and now everything looks as I had expected.
Entirely user error, but isn't this something that should have been picked up during registration?
I had 4 sessions, out of which 3 were assigned the correct flats, and one was assigned 69 light frames instead of 35 flats - still it somehow managed to create a masterflat of that session.
This is a question more out of curiosity than requesting idiot-proofing as this was 100% my fault.
For fun. Correct flat on the left, accidental flat on the right.
Hi @wheeljack,
Detection such an issue in registration will be very difficult considering the wide range of data in terms of quality and resolution that used load into APP. I guess it would be smarter to detect this from analysis in the masterFlat somehow.
But, I always recommend everyone to double check data calibration before starting 3)Analyse stars or later. You really want to load some lights in the calibrated view before starting anything I think, you need to confirm yourself that your calibration masters are working as expected. It saves a lot of time and frustration.
Mabula
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Aah... That makes sense. Thanks for explaining.
I agree this was entirely user error and easily avoidable, my question was more out of curiosity as in my mind I thought registration of flats would fail if stars were detected in the flats for example.
Hi @wheeljack,
No problem 🙂
as in my mind I thought registration of flats would fail if stars were detected in the flats for example
Flats are never analysed like light frames, we do not check for stars and flats should never be registered in terms of aligning them on stars because the purpose of flats is to correct light frames for illumination problems which represent themselves in light frames on the whole camera's sensor. So the flat frames represent the illumination profile of your imaging setup on your camera's sensor 😉 so we should never apply alignment on flats.
Also, some astrophotographers shoot so-called sky flats, they shoot flats at dawn for instance and these flats work well and can have some stars in them as well which will be gone in the masterflat due to outlier rejection.
Mabula
