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.
OK, here's the problem: for some reason Stellarmate won't play nice with my mount so I'm confined to 45 second subs. A few nights ago I took about 200 45 sec subs at ISO800 with my full spectrum modded Pentax K-5 DSLR and a 300/4 lens at the half stop between F/4 and f/5.6 in my Bortle 4 backyard. I see some stars and I know that the horsehead and flame should be in the frame (a quick capture at ISO 3200 showed them quite clearly). When I stack the subs (and bias frames, no darks or flats), I get the serious data warning, but go ahead anyway. The final stack at 16.306 seconds exposure, shows nothing. Even when stretched to the max, there's no nebulosity, just some stars.Â
What could cause this and how would I be able to deal with this (other than trying to get Stellarmate up and running to enable autoguiding)?
Many thanks in advance!
Hans
Dear Hans,
Do I understand correctly that you are only using lights and bias frames? In that case the warning indicates that either
- your bias are not compatible with your lights in terms of sensor gain and or offset
- your lights are simply exposed to shortly
- Or the bias are not in fact bias but something else... how do the bias frames look?
It definitely sounds like the bias subtraction subtracts much more than only the bias signal, so maybe you even have a light leak in your optical train?
Mabula
Dear mabula.
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Yes, I have shot only lights and bias and in the meantime I've shot flats as well. The sensor gain for all of them is ISO800 and I can share a bias frame tomorrow when I have access to my data again. I guess this may be down to the lights not being exposed long enough, but that makes me wonder how I can determine whether there's enough signal in them? Is there a metric for this?
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I don't think there's a light leak as the lens and camera a covered during the imaging, as is the viewfinder. Is there a way to identify light leakages (perhaps stretching a dark to the extreme?)
I'm about to process a dataset taken with a different DLSR and if that doesn't have the same problem/warning, I'll share that as well.
Many thanks,
hans
It would be the easiest if we can have a look at some of the data indeed. You can upload 10 lights, 10 bias and 10 flats (if you have those) that display the issue to our server.
Hi Vincent,
Apologies for taking so long, but things hot swamped a bit in my inbox. Anyway, I've uploaded the lights and bias frames. No flats for this session, I'm afraid. Many thanks in advance!
All the best,
hans
Thank you Hans! Unfortunately I'll be in London tomorrow morning so I will have to look at the data in a week, apologies for the delay as well.
No worries at all! Enjoy London and I'm busy as it is processing my comet data.
Hope to see your comet on the Pentax forum, Hans!
I'll certainly share it as soon as I have wrestled through Photoshop....
