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.
I have a very small data set: about 49 light frames from an ASI1600 camera. Some of them were captured using a different telescope. I am trying to register the subframes with the mosaic setting, but it seems like APP is doing the dynamic distortion calculation using just a single core and is running super slowly. It takes more than 5 hours to complete registration with DDC enabled. You can see in the screenshot only about 105% of the 8 core CPU is being used, which in macOS indicates single core operation (if 200% is being used, that's 2 cores of the CPU being used, and so on..). Is this expected?
Â
This could be because of the process yes, only @mabula-admin can answer that, but APP does report to be using 7 threads. So if it isn't, it might be it doesn't do it at this stage internally. Lets see what Mabula says..
During the multi view registration, my multi-core PC is using all the threads I've said. However during this specific task of the registration where it can't find a region to map and is decreasing the "trust" - it could be that it is actually just using one thread - it seems that your mosaic doesn't have a region it can combine: the "Decreasing Trust Region"Â comes up (for me at least) when it is struggling to find areas of commonality in your mosaic.
In your Activity Monitor you can see the Thread Count for that APP process is 155. Obviously your PC doesn't have that many threads available, so APP is multi-threaded, but just isn't using it for this part of the calculation. And in this case, your data is very likely never going to combine into a Mosaic because there isn't an overlapping region.
I had the same scenario on Linux - I left a mosaic running thinking my regions were good, but it was perpetually looping with messages about "Decreasing Trust Region"
Here's Mosaic Registration under Linux showing all allocated cores running hot:
Â
Update to my post above thinking it is a specific calculation based on no-overlapping data: I can concur/agree that the DDC calculation is using a single thread as per OP:
The bold thread is 99%, rest are idle
