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.
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.
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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.
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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
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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
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Excellent @jeroenm,
I am glad you found the source of the problem 😉
Cheers,
Mabula
