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.
Noob here. Happy with APP so far, got some very good results (and others not so good), but now I'm at a loss. I took some 400 subs of M45 across 2 nights. I have my darklib already processed, and I took flats for both nights. But when I processed all frames, using basically the same workflow I used for other objects (which mostly consists of using pretty much only defaults), I'm getting this warning in the normalisation or integration stage:
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WARNING: you might have a serious data issue!
This is only a warning that you might have a serious data problem.
You can safely continue processing your data and this warning is only shown once.
Warning is triggered on file:
M_45_Light_15_secs_Low-Noise_Gain125_Offset20_T-10C_002.fits
Despite having enabled an adaptive pedestal on your data,
to prevent the clipping of pixels to a value of 0,
1167952 pixels are still clipping to 0 while using the adaptive pedestal.
Without the pedestal, 1552114 pixels were clipping to 0.
This might be a serious data issue which you want to solve,
because it could lead to a problem with your integrated data.
It is caused by either:
1) your data is underexposed. If your setup allows it, try to expose longer.
2) your bias/MasterBias/dark/MasterDark frame(s) are not compatible
with your lights due to having a different sensor offset/pedestal.
3) you have a light leakage in your optical train so your bias/dark frames are not good.
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Now, needless to say, the integration results are total crap. I get this big circle (either purple or yellow, depending on whether bg neutralisation is on/off), surrounded by the rest of the frame with a deep red or blue hue. The histogram looks really bad, with lots of green and red and blue seems to be mostly absent (which is odd, as M45 is basically blue-ish).
I tried integrating with and without calibration frames. Without calibration I don't get the warning, but results are equally as bad.
So, what could be happening here? Is it my dark frames? My bias? My flats? Surely it can't be all 400 subs that are wrong? Maybe some of them are bad and if I exclude those I can get better results? Is it the bayer matrix? It shouldn't be, as I'm pretty sure I've used the same bayer matrix for other objects and it went just fine.
Experts of APP, I need your help. How do I go thought the 400+ subs and figure out if there's something wrong with them? Or can I upload some of them and let the wizards of APP do their magic and expose my noobiness? Thanks!
Aaaaaaaand I've figured it out, thanks to this thread. My darks were taken with offset 20, which is a good value to use for the Player One Poseidon C. But the lights had offset 0 (I forgot to set it to 20), which explains the problem. So, now I'm going back to reprocessing, using only the flats (at 15" exposures, the IMX571 shouldn't produce too much noise, so it should be ok-ish), and see if I still see those horrible colour bands. If I do, as I can no longer retake those flats, I'll just process without calibration and, fingers crossed, will be able to post-process that vignetting away.
Hi Nelson @nsousa,
Excellent, I am happy that you were able to solve the issue yourself with the sensor offset not being compatible between your lights and calibration frames.
Were you able to get better results now? You should be able to correct the vignetting and other gradients well with APP's Remove Light Pollution tool. Did you try that?
Mabula
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Better? Yes. Good? No 🙂 Getting vignetting out without flats is quite tricky, especially in a target like M45. It's mostly blue nebulosity, so the vigneting correction algorithm had to work overtime.
Lesson learned: make sure to set the offset on your light frames to match your calibration frames.
