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.
I'm about to shoot an all-sky mosaic using a computer controlled equatorial mount. I can specify alt-azimuth coordinates in degrees and the software does the rest.
I was wondering what are the optimal alt-azimuth values to specify to get the best results from APP.
This is a tricky mosaic to stitch for panorama software because the camera rotates so it is never horizontal in relation to the ground. But I'm reasonably sure APP can handle that.
Another issue is that I don't really know how to uniformly spread alt-azimuth values uniformly over a sphere. But I'll figure that out. In the meantime I might just rotate azimuth from 0 to 360 and altitude from 0 to 90. It will get quite squished near the zenith. Is that a challenge for APP?
Hi @ddnum,
Indeed, APP can register widefield data 😉 with a very large field of view. For example this 180 degree mosaic, shot at 14mm focal length:
In your case, the field of view will be larger than 120 degrees, since you mention an all-sky mosaic.
In that case, you must use the calibrated projective registration mode in 4). The calibration enables a different data projection than the default rectilinear projection. A rectilinear projection will never work with a field of view larger than 120 degrees.
I was wondering what are the optimal alt-azimuth values to specify to get the best results from APP.
There aren't, but I would recommend enough overlap between the mosaic panels, with more overlap, the result will be more robust. So 20% overlap will give you a much higher chance of a good result than 10% overlap 😉
Another issue is that I don't really know how to uniformly spread alt-azimuth values uniformly over a sphere. But I'll figure that out. In the meantime I might just rotate azimuth from 0 to 360 and altitude from 0 to 90. It will get quite squished near the zenith. Is that a challenge for APP?
APP can handle that, this is a 30 panel mosaic surrounding polaris (data courtesy of Scott Rosen @scott_rosen ) shot with 2 different camera's:
Do let me know if you need assistance when you are starting to process the data 😉 . I have been working on a big upgrade of the registration engine as well to also further improve and speed-up mosaic registration and to add more data projections like sperical.
Kind regards,
Mabula
Thanks for the reply. I'm going to shoot 21 images at the vertices of an icosahedron. I'm doing the calculations to see if there will be enough overlap.
Where the images overlap does APP integrate the pixels? If each panel is a stack of 4 images does the overlapped area have the SNR ratio of 8 images? If that is the case then I can really go hard on the overlapping area knowing that it increases my SNR ratio so no pixels are wasted.
