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 regularly stack +2000 images a session and run into the problem that sometimes in star analysis and further on again in Registration I get errors. No worries, I sort the list, then manually delete the few erroneous FITS and restart to finally integrate.
But is there no checkbox to automatically neglect the erroneous FITS files and continue the process? This question because running the analysis again means a loss of at least 2 hours per step and per session 🙁 Would be an immense help. Maybe the option is there, but didn't find it yet ...
Then the integration, I'm doing a 5 session one of 2500frames each (lights no spitted channels)
Calculations at integration consumes on average temporary 180MB*4 = nearly 1TB!
I'm writing the separate session raw integrations FITS, wo that's good.
I have now found back a 5the session (that I thought I had lost)
Question:
IF I process the 5th one and integrate this 5th session seperatly (not stretched or worked on ie step 6)
Then restart APP and load the 5 separate integrated session FITS (not stretched or worked on ie step 6) from APP
which would consume significantly less HDD space (only 5 separate processed session integration fits)
Would this give me the same result as reprocessing the 5 sessions completely (10.000 fits) into one final integration (integrate all)?
What is the recommended workflow for such cases?
thx
J
Hi Jan @janwalschap,
Thank you very much for your question.
Wow, that is a lot of images !!! Why do you stack so much? Do you use very short exposure times? If so, why? Why not expose a bit longer and get less images? I ask this, because if you can expose a bit longer, chances are good that the results will be better.
If each session is already 2500 images, than the result of integrating 5 session integrations of all 2500 frames will be the same as doing all together 12500 frames I would expect. The difference will be determined by outlier rejection performance and that will already perform very well wth 100 image, let alone 2500.
For me the recommend workflow is :
yes, create integrations first per session and then combine those sessions. And I would recommend to shoot far less frames but with longer exposure times if your setup allows it, things will be better for sure because the read noise will be more easily swamped in each exposure allowing you to go deeper.
Mabula
