Apr 9 2026 APP 2.0.0-beta40 has been released !
It has a major performance boost of 30-50% over 2.0.0-beta39 from calibration to integration, for mosaics even faster! 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. Improved Outlier Rejection with LN 2.0 rejection. macOS CMD+A works now in file chooser ! And more, all will be added to the release notes in the coming hours...
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.
Hello!
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I am curious how APP works with suboptimal images.
I just did my first long exposures when trying my new duo-narrowband filter. However, with 10-15 minute exposures, I get oval shaped stars. 5 minutes seems to be fine tho. I tried going with 15 minutes for some times, so I accumulated 7 images, and also 2 images with 10 minutes. These all have bad star shapes:
I still went ahead and stacked them alongside the clean 5 minute subs, and the end result is very good, against my expectation:
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For a comparison, I also did an integration with just the 5 minute subs, which is about half the exposure time, and with the long exposures also stacked, I dont see any negative effects on the stars in the comparison. Same size, just more signal in the nebula (obviously)
So, on first glance there doesn't seem to be any downside, yet my feeling tells me there should be some negatives coming with using worse data. Also regarding the saying "garbage in garbage out". I wonder at which point it is not recommended to use a frame anymore, as in how distorted stars have to be that it would really have an effect.
Can bad images make the entire integration worse, or will they just be ignored at some point?
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CS Tobi
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It will depend on how many bad frames you have overall, the algorithm will give images with better star shapes a higher "priority" so to say, but the signal of images with worse stars is still used. This means, with enough data you can keep satellite trails in and also a bit of bad data (more data is better rejection and noise). Clouds and such I wouldn't include, neither really really bad stars, but like you have it results in a good final image. So that's great I think, works as expected. 🙂
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edit: You can also opt to stack, say, 90% of frames, this will throw away data that is deemed worse.
