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.
Here is a screenshot of an integration done from two sessions. Camera was rotated between the sessions but they were otherwise identical -- optics, exposure, gain, filter. Processed in APP in multi-session and mosaic modes, I get this. You can see where the screaming amp-glow of the 183 sensor is very well calibrated out in the angled frames, but not at all in the ones that are oriented horizontally. (Note the characteristic starburst on the right, but also the glow along the edge that so effectively highlights the seam between these imaging sessions!)
Obviously I need to throw this integration away, but then what should I do differently? I don't want to just compose two separately-stacked images, since I'll lose the SNR boost from stacking in the overlapping section.
Thanks for your help!
How did you process the two images? Multi-band processing? Multi-session processing? It looks as though the darks were only applied to one set of the images and not to the other. I *suspect* that you assigned your darks only to one session and not to the other but I cannot be sure unless you tell us exactly how you produced this integration.
Wouter
Yes to both -- multi-session, multi-band, since I also had OIII data (but only for one session). It's possible that I would have neglected to assign the darks but I would surprise myself if so: I'm perfectly aware of how critical darks are for the 183! I have a vague recollection of only being able to assign something to one session, when I wanted it to go to more than one and thinking "Huh, that's funny". So maybe that was it? Or maybe I was trying to assign the OIII data to both sessions, which makes no sense but that's never stopped me before.
I know Mabula strives to make APP pretty idiot-proof but I'm a particularly determined idiot. Part of the problem here is that I was running this off frames stored on my NAS instead of on my computer's local disk, and so every step took so long that I'd pretty much forgotten the details of the preceding one by the time I was setting up the next.
I'll try it again tonight and report back. Thanks!
I still see a little bit of difference in how the two sessions calibrated, but it's like night and day (OK, given the "sunburst" amp glow that's a really terrible pun). I actually don't have darks at exactly the right temperature so I used some that were done about 5℃ warmer. That would certainly make it hard to get all the amp glow out, but I only see it on one of the sessions, not both. Still, it's a ton better, so I must have neglected to assign the darks to both sessions the first time around. I also added bias frames this time, which may have helped a bit, and I don't think I put in the flats that I did in the first session.
Thanks for the help in tracking down my mistake. All in all, it's a much, much better result, and I can easily crop out the remaining glow.
