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.
Currently after an imaging run I process the subs through Analyze Stars (Tab 3) and evaluate subs based on star roundness. Anything under .60 gets deleted. When I feel enough integration time has been reached, I process everything with no further screening of subs.
I am wondering about the correctness of this. Is there a function like PI’s SubFrameSelector? What other tools, methods, and guidelines are APP users employing?
Usually you won't really need to delete data based on that, if you have enough. APP will apply a quality rating to each sub and will use the worse frames less for the end-result, but it may still help quite a bit to increase overall signal.
Hi Vincent, does this mean that very bad subs will be skipped by APP? So, I don't have to worry about bad subs?
They won't be skipped no, but they will have less of an impact. If you have subs with clouds or something, those I would take out manually. They can be skipped if you select to stack the "top-90%" or whatever percentage you want in the integrate tab.
Vincent, thanks for the reply.
Currently after an imaging run I process the subs through Analyze Stars (Tab 3) and evaluate subs based on star roundness. Anything under .60 gets deleted. When I feel enough integration time has been reached, I process everything with no further screening of subs.
I am wondering about the correctness of this. Is there a function like PI’s SubFrameSelector? What other tools, methods, and guidelines are APP users employing?
Hi Jeff @jeffmorgan,
Please try APP 2.0.0-beta17 from our downloads page if you have not tried it yet. It shows you analytical graphs will processing, you can sort the data by clicking on the column headers and then if you plot the data on for isntance the star shape then you can easily remove frames with bad stars :-), you can make different plots with the right mouse button click menu on the frame list.
Mabula
