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,
Have just upgraded to beta 20 and am experiencing crashes while doing a mosaic of previously stacked panels. Everything goes fine and APP announces that it has finished and saves the file but, when it tries to load it into the image viewer, APP quits and I get a message saying that 'Java quit unexpectedly'. Â
I can open the final mosaic that APP created in a FITS viewer with no problems (and it looks nice) and I can re-load it into APP if I restart the software....but as soon as I try to load it into the image viewer then it crashes everything again. Â The Mosaic is 2GB but I am running an M1 Mac with 64GB memory.
I have the Apple crash log for when Java quits if that helps (but not sure how to export it - could do a screen shot of the first page)
Any advice greatly appreciated.
thanks, Jon
Edit by Mabula: fixed in 2.0.0-beta29
Thanks for the report, I'll notify Mabula!
I have now tried to reproduce this strange behaviour using both beta 9 and beta 2 (albeit on a different - Intel based - Mac). In these cases the Java does not crash but the image viewer displays quite a colourful result - see below!
As before with beta 20, the mosaic is actually produced without any problem and can be easily viewed with a FITS viewer....it just seems to cause problems for the APP image viewer. I enclose the mosaic file as seen in QuickFits for comparison.
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Hi Jon,
Thank you very much for sharing your issue,
I am working on a stability issue with beta20 with the highest priority. I think you might suffer from this as well. I will release a new version with the fix a.s.a.p.
Mabula
many thanks!
I'm afraid that I still can't open a mosaic created in APP in the image viewer, even with beta 22. Loads into APP OK but when I double click it to open in the image viewer, it starts to load, gets to about 90%, then crashes both Java and APP. Need to restart computer to recover Java. M1 Mac running OS 13.4.1. Mosaics are about 2 GB and I have tried several of them with the same result. Â As noted above they open fine in a FITS viewer so don't appear to be corrupted?
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p.s. I have just determined that this is related to the Open GL button. With this on? (ie green) the image viewer will crash, with it off (orange CPU showing) then it will load the file fine. Don't know what that means but it is reproducible...
Pressing that button will disable the use of a GPU to be used for the viewer (and enables CPU rendering). This apparently points to either a driver issue or something else, as you're using a Mac I'll ask Mabula what he thinks.
Hi Jon @jdwood,
Thank you very much for reporting this.
This error is clear, something does not work well with OpenGL on the new Apple Silicon computers and this error is very likely caused by a bug in an external library that we use to support OpenGL with APP. I need to report this error upstream so they can fix this in their library. To be sure, can you upload the mosaic file here, so I can test it as well on my M1 mac, maybe I can create a workaround for now to have APP load the image automatically with OpenGL disabled so the application does not crash.
https://upload.astropixelprocessor.com/
username: uploadData
password: uploadTestData
Please make a folder like : JonWoodhead-OpenGL-AppleSilicon-bug
and let me know once uploaded.
To be clear, this bug has been introduced by using a newer version of this OpenGL library a couple of versions ago, beta2 and beta9 were using an older version which also did not work well as you got the rainbow result, the rainbow happens if the texture size is reported incorrectly or if the library fails to read it correctly from the macOS OpenGL driver.
Mabula
thanks for looking at this Mabula,
I have uploaded an example file as requested. Sorry that it is large - these are 'intermediate panels' of a very large mosaic that I have been working on. Still need to work out whether my machine has the strength to pull all of them together into a final image!
Hi Jon @jdwood,
This issue is finally fixed in 2.0.0-beta29. APP will not crash and the image will be shown properly on Apple Silicon macs. Thank you very much for your patience 😉
Will try to release it soon!
Mabula
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@mabula-admin great news! All thanks to you for all your hard work Mabula. Â cheers, Jon
