UPDATE FROM MABULA
I have had a very rough 2 months unfortunately health wise. I was struck 3x in a row with bacterial infections. The second infection occurred  after a routine hospital checkup and I became very sick. I had to rest and take a lot of antibiotics. Once I was recovering and restarting work 1 month ago, I again became sick. The infection was not yet gone, so even more antibiotics and rest was needed. Needless to say, it took a lot of my energy and I needed a lot of rest.
Finally, the infection is really gone and my energy is coming back step-by-step now and I have started work again. I am terribly sorry to have kept you waiting for support. I will address all outstanding questions and e-mails step-by step and will be on the forum daily from today.
APP 2.0.0-beta47 will come soon as well, a lot of work was already completed before I became very ill, so the release is also nearly ready for you. Beta47 will be much faster actually. Many workflows will be more than 2x faster, mosaics can even be 10x faster than before because registration really received a major boost... all compared to beta46. Â Before I release it, I will make sure that everything is working properly and then I will release it.
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.
