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.
2026-10-03- UPDATE FROM MABULA
I am glad to announce that I am finally fully healed, my energy and strength are really back now !
In the past 3 weeks while recovering, I have prioritzed the release of 2.0.0-beta47. So much work has accumulated into this release that it needed to be tested extensively, but also it needed to be available for all of you. Unless a big problem is reported for this release, I expect it will be the final release, finally !, before the official 2.0.0 release.
I spent 3 nights doing RGB on M81. The camera didn't stay on the scope so a couple of the channels had to get post-rotated. I also tried to do LP corrections on each channel prior to combining. Is this a mistake? All 3 channels were stacked from scratch at the same time. I ended up with "Incompatible Sizes". Again! So I am dead in the water with good data. Very frustrating.
What do I need to do to ensure that this doesn't keep happening to me? At what step are sizing differences introduced? I do "no stretch", keeping the images linear.
When is it "safe" to rotate and do LP adjustments?  At what point should I hit "OK and save" to prevent the stupid computer from mis-sizing the images? They are all un-binned, so nothing like that is happening. Life is short to contemplate having to go shoot 3 more nights of the same target.
I guess you still have the raw data right? If so, then we should be able to solve this. If not, I might have to get a look at some of the data.
But normally you don't have to rotate the images yourself, APP does this automatically during registration. The LP correction can be done per channel, but I would do it at the end when all is integrated, it doesn't make a lot of difference and might even be a bit better, because the background per channel will be different anyway.
@vincent-mod
When the 3 channels all were integrated, it showed the 3 integrations. The individual stacks were all rotated on the screen, not level. The LP removal could have waited. So, I attempted to re-rotate the off level images. And I attempted to run LP correction on them. That's what was done that I don't normally do. Which of those procedures introduced new sizing dimensions to the stacks?
The dimensions can change a bit when integrating, due to slight misalignments and such. But that's usually not an issue. You know, maybe I got what is happening...
Did you try to combine the R, G and B and then ran into dimension issues? If so, this because you need to first register and normalize those integrations against each other first. So you get the 3 integrated files and you load them in again as lights. Then you go to the normalize tab, activate normalization and when done, save the normalized frames. Those then can be combined.
