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.
Hi I am sure this has been asked but I can’t find any posts that helps. I have taken more subs for the same target but instead of reloading all the light files from previous session and having to reintegrate them with new lights from a new session is it faster to add the older master integrations for each channel to be integrated together with the new lights? If so is there a process for doing this please? PC is heavily under load and crashes with more lights to deal with
You can make 2 separate integrations, then reload those in as new lights and do the integration of those again.
To develop a bit more on this: there are 2 main things you want to achieve when deciding how to combine multiple sessions:
- Get the best out of the data in terms of noise and quality
- Ensure outliers (satellites, etc, but also star bloats from bad seeing/focus) are well taken care of
The first point I honestly would not say you have a huge difference in terms of quality when stacking multiple sessions vs single big session, and the gain in time is very significant, especially until we can save sessions to stop-and-continue (ahem, very subtle hint? 😍).
The only real risk is the second: when combining pre-stacked chunks of your images, if you have outliers that have remained on your individual sessions' stacks, you risk not having enough images in the final stacking to get rid of them (e.g. imagine having 2 sessions only each with a leftover streak from a satellite in different places). Whereas if you stack everything together you're much more likely to get rid of outliers completely.
If you have 20-30 images or more on each of your sessions you can probably just add the stacks together, but if you're working with very few long exposures that can be an issue.
Hope this helps!
p.s. if you're stacking the big pre-stacked images you might as well do light pollution removal on each of your session stacks to get rid of big gradients prior to stacking them
