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.
EDIT by Mabula: solved by enabling 3) analyze stars, cosmic ray/noise reducer
Hi. After many successful years with APP, I'm hitting problems stacking images properly.
I take what looks like a decent series of images, which, individually look fine, but when i stack them, I'd just getting a blurred mess. I ache a screen shot of an individual file, and the combined stack.
These shots are from a batch of 100 images I took of M51. The full stack of 100 was just a series of burred lines. These are from random selection of 10, just to show whats happening
I hope someone can help because I'm at my wit end with this
Thanks
In 3) analyse stars, you need to enable the cosmic ray/noise reducer and set the lower limit area size to 15-20. Then try again, it will probably work as expected then.
The stacked result looks to have a lot of noise, so I suspect that no Bad Pixel Mapping is used, maybe also no darks for some reason? I think that APP is locking onto hot pixels instead of stars to register on here.
Let me know if this helps.
Mabula
Thanks Mabula
I did use darks, flats, dark flats and BPM in the calibration stage. Maybe I should run some new darks and generate a new BPM from them, and rerun the process.
I’ll give it a try. Thank you
Hi Mabula
The advice about Step 3 worked perfectly - thank you so much 🙂
Here's the final image with the best 75 frames stacked
Hi Dave @davehux,
That looks really great ! Thanks for the feedback, I am happy to read that my suggestion solved it.
I will try to improve this behaviour in star analysis for sure going forward. Ideally, the noise reducer should become redundant.
Mabula
