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.
Didn't really know how to best phrase a question, so here's some background info:
Yesterday there were clouds coming and going. So much so that PHD2 every so often lost the guidestar, but I kept imaging anyway as the plan was to simply throw out subs with too much cloud coverage in them. All I really wanted was some data to play with. It cleared up and clouded over again for the entire evening, but in the end I had about 100 light frames of 180s each (roughly 5 hours). I had to discard one(!) because of something bumping the tripod, the rest was, as far as sharp, round stars concerned, usable.
So, I started the process of sorting subs like I always do. Those with clouds were moved into a different folder to go through later and those with clear skies were kept in the same folder. But... just for giggles really, I decided to try to stack everything - just to see how it turned out. The results I got after stacking was not was I expected - at all. My subs looked like these (cloudy one on the left, clear one on the right), and consisted of a mix. If I were to guess, i'd say about half were clear, half were very much like the one on the left.
Yet, the end result and first look without doing anything with it in APP looked like this:
 I expected a mess if I'm being honest. What I instead got was a stacked dataset that can look very good once properly post-processed.
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That got me wondering? Is some sort of analyzing or other forms of wizardry being performed in the stacking process that discard "unusable" data/pixels? I had set it to use 100% of the frames, checked Local Normalization Rejection using adaptive rejection and 1 iteration of 1st degree LNC.
Just a question out of curiosity really. This software keep impressing me.
You're right, we're actually wizards. Darn, we did keep that a secret for years...
😉 No, to be serious, APP analyzes each frame for various things, especially regarding star size and shape. A quality score is then calculated per frame and those with the lowest quality scores will not be included as much as those with the highest quality scores. If you have enough data, that will work very well. You can test what the result is when you select to stack only 90% and 50% for instance.
That makes sense. (the wizard-part of course).
Thanks for replying and confirming my suspicions. I genuinely was curious, especially since I intentionally asked it to stack everything.
