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.
Note I am using APP 1.074.1, as 1.075 doesn't play well on my Mac. The OpenGL image viewer fails constantly.
Last night I shot 90 minutes of Luminance with an ASI1600MM-Pro, and 45 minutes of RGB with an ASI294MC-Pro. I don't have enough back focus to use the filter wheel on this scope, which is why I am trying this. I have lights, darks, flats and flat darks for the two camera/scope setups.
The way I approached this in APP follows below. Note it did NOT work at all:
1) Load and calibrate the Luminance data, and use 'save calibrated frames'
2) Load and calibrate the RGB data and use both 'save calibrated frames' and 'split channels', so that I end up with 3 sets of calibrated lights from the OSC camera
3) Load all the calibrated lights from 1 & 2 above, and select multi-filter and multi-session processing
4) Integrate as per my normal LRGB flow that uses a filter wheel
This appeared to work, and I ended up with 4 integrations. I then went to load them into the RGB combine tool, when I noticed something was very wrong. I loaded the Luminance integration into the image viewer, and it appeared to have been de-bayered. There were color artifacts in the background, not the black and white view I expected. I then loaded the Red channel integration, and it was completely wrong, with an almost solid black background and 100% saturated stars. The galaxy was not visible at all.
Given the above approach did not work, what should I be doing to combine the data from the two cameras?
Thanks,
Scott
An update. After the issues I had with trying to combine the data from the mono and OSC cameras, I calibrated and stacked them separately. The OSC light frames still would not calibrate correctly when using the master dark from my library. I re-shot the darks using my current version of SGP (3.1) and that fixed the calibration issues I was having with the OSC data.
Once I figured that out I re-tried my steps from above to combine the mono + OSC, and it worked. Here is my result, NGC891 and part of the Perseus Galaxy Cluster:
Hi Scott,
Sorry for not coming back to this sooner; I had a short time-out during these days.
So, that is very interesting as a solution. You basically said that SGP, the previous version, did something with the calibration data?
Vincent,
Yes, the only change that had been made since I last successfully calibrated an image with that camera was the version of SGP I was running. The master dark I had been using was from dark frames taken with SGP 3.0. So I decided to try creating a new master dark with frames taken with the current version of SGP I was using, 3.1. Happily that fixed the problem, though I have no idea why it was needed.
