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. Before I release it, I will make sure that everything is working properly and then I will release it.
I know you mainly get questions and issues here, I’ve certainly posted my share. So I just wanted to express my appreciation for APP. I image with a stock Alt/Az Goto Dobsonian, a telescope that should not, in any way, be able to do deep sky astrophotography.
And it was difficult at first… stacking would fail with Deep Sky Stacker, the rotation over an imaging session would have awful boundaries on other stackers, but APP was not only the most robust of four stackers I tried, but it produced the best results. Who would have thought that images like this could pretty easily be captured with a basic observational Dob!
This is with a full frame camera on a focal reduced (f3.65) 12” Dob allowing me to capture this in only 3 hours from my suburban Bortle 7 backyard. I tried stacking it in other systems but only APP could handle the complexity of rotated subs, my drift causing mis-registration, my desire to maximize and increase the imaging frame to hold all these drifting rotating subs, and handling the highly vignettes corners from using a too big sensor on a focal reduced observational newtonian! Talk about a pressure test! But it works! Yay for LNC and MBB and integrating in full mode!
Good job!
PS: my big ask would be to create a way to stack 6000 24-megapixel subs with field rotation without using 4-6TB of SSD. Either perhaps compressing the intermediate data you save with compression tuned for the data format you store or provide a way to stack a big job in chunks and then stack the final output together. I do that manually now.
That made my weekend at least, always great to hear from people that have fun with it. 🙂 We will always work on improving the data processing, it already uses less memory in the latest beta, disk space is a different matter though, I'll ask Mabula if some type of compression would be possible.
