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 all,
not really a APP problem - it's doing it's job very well, but I ran into a major problem I can't get solved. Lately I'm having problems with the calibration process with my flats. I didn't change anything in my setup, the process of calibration or anything else for that matter. It look like my flats are over correcting the dust bunnies in my image train. I have 2 kinds of "donuts": small ones that are close te the sensor of my CCD, a bit dark and are visible in the master flat. The second ones are larger, have a bit less contrast, are bigger in size and are almost not visible in the master flat.
After calibrating the lights with a master dark and master flat, registering and stacking I got a really nice M101 with only 5 hours of data (luminance) with my SBIG STF8300M and 10" F5 Newton. A bit of gradient, but that's normal considering the light pollution I'm stuck with. After applying the "light pollution correction" in APP the result has strange gradients in the background I can't get rid of. After a lot of try-and-error with different settings, a new set of flats etc I finally figured out that my flats are causing this problem.
Not the way to go (I know) I tried applying the light pollution correction to my master flat to see what's going on with the flats. As you can see in the attached screenshot it's full of small donuts (dust close to the sensor) and larger donuts caused by dust on the luminance filter. The smaller donuts are corrected well, but it looks like the larger ones are a kind of over corrected and now appear as bright cirkels in my stack. To make the whole picture complete I added 4 pictures: the final stack before correction, the stack after correction with "light pollution correction", the master flat and the master flat after "light pollution correction". Thus last one is really showing the donuts. Besides APP I also tried calibration in 2 other programs with the same result. Anyone having any ideas?
Hi Jeroen @jeroenm,
APP 1.059 does have a problem with flat-field correction on some data sets. This will be corrected in APP 1.060 which will have a very big upgrade of the complete calibration engine 😉
Since you get the same results in other applications, the source of your problem is most likely to be found in how shoot your flats possibly. How are you making them? What kind of exposure time do you use?
Perhaps, you were able to locate the source of the problem in the mean time?
Kind regards,
Mabula
Hi Mabula,
the problem is already solved. Looks like I had a lot of moist in my imagetrain which caused the problem. I make my flats with Sequence Generator Pro, using the ADU value of the camera and this never led to any problems. Really looking forward to the latest version of APP!
kind regards,
Jeroen
Hi Mabula,
the problem is already solved. Looks like I had a lot of moist in my imagetrain which caused the problem. I make my flats with Sequence Generator Pro, using the ADU value of the camera and this never led to any problems. Really looking forward to the latest version of APP!
kind regards,
Jeroen
Excellent @jeroenm,
I am glad you found the source of the problem 😉
Cheers,
Mabula
