Mar 28 2026 APP 2.0.0-beta40 will be released in 7 days.
It did take a long time to have the work finished on this and it will have a major performance boost of 30-50% over 2.0.0-beta39 from calibration to integration. We extensively optimized many critical parts of APP. All has been tested to guarantee correct optimizations. Drizzle and image resampling is much faster for instance, those modules have been completely rewritten. Much less memory usage. LNC 2.0 will be released which works much better and faster than LNC in it's current state. And more, all will be added to the release notes in the coming weeks...
Update on the 2.0.0 release & the full manual
We are getting close to the 2.0.0 stable release and the full manual. The manual will soon become available on the website and also in PDF format. Both versions will be identical and once released, will start to follow the APP release cycle and thus will stay up-to-date to the latest APP version.
Once 2.0.0 is released, the price for APP will increase. Owner's license holders will not need to pay an upgrade fee to use 2.0.0, neither do Renter's license holders.
Hello Guys, my integration stops (no progress) during 6) Integration: LNC: iter 1 performing LNC calculation...
(see screenshot: "1) LOAD")
It does not continue. Showing progress of "completed 28%" the whole time.
What can I do? Should I just wait some hours? (usually my PC is very fast with 32MB RAM and a new generation CPU)
The blue/white "balloons" under the "completed 28%" message are still mooving, but I don´t see any other progress..
I loaded 60 Ha lights, Masterdark, Masterflat and Masterdarkflat.
Tried also with single frames (not masters). Did not help. All frames captured with same camera & optics in the same night. This are my settings:
1) LOAD:
2) CALIBRATE:
3) ANALYSE STARS:
4) REGISTER:
5) NORMALIZE:
6) INTEGRATE:
additional information:
@kowalski Hi! Is there any reason not to use the defaults? You have disabled 32 bit masters in tab 2 and changed the scale stop tab 4. Possibly there are other changes as well. Please try with everything at default and let us know if that helped.
Thanks, Wouter
Hi Wouter, it finally worked after I set everything to default as you suggested. But I also could not use the before created Masters.. Even not the 16Bit Masters. However, its a miricle to me why it did not work with LCN 1st degree..
Thanks a lot for your fast reply!
Have a nice day
For the OIII channel with the same settings I have got this result:
There are crosses instead of stars.. :
Zoom:
🙁
Should I maybe enable the "neutralize background" option in 5) NORMALIZE?
(I just know it did not work well in previous APP versions)
For now I have it disabled
@kowalski What camera, telescope and filter did you use to shoot the OIII data? What software to shoot those data with? What exposure time, what gain/ISO and what temperature (if the camera is cooled)? Did you make sure to use the same gain/ISO and temperature for the calibration data?
Dear Wouter, for Ha and OIII was all the same:
- QHY268M camera cooled at -10°C
- 100/550 refractor
- 3nm HA and OIII NB filters
- Gain 56 for Lights and Darks
- Only for Darks an offset of 20 was used, whereas for all other data an offset of 10 was used
- Software: NINA
- The Gain (56) was the same for Darks and Lights BUT was different for Flats and Darkflats because I wantet to keep the exposure time for Flats and Darkflats short, therefore I increased the gain for Flats and Darkflats. But I dont think its a problem because the Histogram of Flats and Darkflats I checked and it looks good. Also I use this Flats and Darkflats always as well wirh RGB data. It always worked well so far..
It might be Flats and Darkflats are rotated by eg 1° compared to lights as i had to do them at home and not in the field..
Master Flat:
- Only for Darks an offset of 20 was used, whereas for all other data an offset of 10 was used
Any particular reason why? The offset of the lights and calibration data always needs to be the same.
The Gain (56) was the same for Darks and Lights BUT was different for Flats and Darkflats because I wantet to keep the exposure time for Flats and Darkflats short, therefore I increased the gain for Flats and Darkflats. But I dont think its a problem because the Histogram of Flats and Darkflats I checked and it looks good. Also I use this Flats and Darkflats always as well wirh RGB data. It always worked well so far..
This is correct. As long as the gain, offset and temperature of the lights and darks are the same and for the flats and darkflats are the same, you're good.
What exposure time did you use for the lights? And did you make sure that the exposure time of the lights and darks was the same? And for the flats and darkflats as well?
Its dificult here to quote for more then one sentence so I try to answer that way..
Any particular reason why? The offset of the lights and calibration data always needs to be the same.
I changed all my exposure from offset 20 to 10 but had the old darks with offset 20. Need to do new darks with offset 10..
What exposure time did you use for the lights? And did you make sure that the exposure time of the lights and darks was the same? And for the flats and darkflats as well?
- Of course same exposure for lights and darks (240s)
- Also same exposure time for flats and darkflats
In the meantime - after 10th attempt - I could get a result for the OIII as well. It worked when i have done the integration without darks, flats and darkflats at all (what is not perfect of course). But at least the Night is not wasted. I also got a result without darks (but with flats and darkflats) but then the result was bad because then I saw a "negative" vignetting in the picture.
KR
Its dificult here to quote for more then one sentence so I try to answer that way..
You can select the text you want to quote and then click the quote icon that pops up.
Of course same exposure for lights and darks (240s)
Great! I was pretty sure you were doing that but wanted to be 100% sure 🙂
Also same exposure time for flats and darkflats
Also great!
Regarding the negative vignetting result without using darks, that seems to indicate that the way you create flats may not be good enough for OIII.
Also, a quick internet search showed that this camera generally is used with a higher offset than 10. The recommended value seems to be 50 but values as low as 25 are used. You may want to consider upping that again. But I by no means know much about QHY cameras so that's just me trying to be helpful 🙂
Unfortunatelly I still have no solution here! (had to change to DSS where it works..)
Can someone maybe help me please?
so, finally it works when I dont use darkframes at all.
I used 1 year old darks but this darks were taken with an offset of 15 whereas the Lights are all with offset 10
Is it possible that this is the reason for the problem?
It is yes, as Wouter stated you need them to have the same settings as the lights. Offsets usually are not changed, so I would go for the one that most people use, Wouter menions 50 and not change that. If you have data with offset 10, you need darks with offset 10. DSS works because it doesn't take that into account, which is wrong anyway.
