May 27 2026 APP 2.0.0-beta45 has been released !
Fully Multi-Threaded LNC, many improvements for the registration engine, platform upgrade, and further tuning of internal memory consumption and memory release back to OS.
Apr 14 2026: Google Pay, Apple Pay & WeChat Pay added as payment options
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.
Let's say that I have a total of nine hours of M81: three hours from a Bortle 6 site, three hours from a Bortle 5 site, and three hours from a Bortle 4 site. Furthermore, let's say that I use the same scope, camera, exposure and gain. If I were to process these together to make one final image, can I sort-of expect that it would be equivalent to capturing all nine hours at the Bortle 5 site in terms of SNR? Is there a "gotcha" that I don't understand? Clearly, the background sky ADU will be different at each site. Does APP "normalize" this out?
Thank you!
So it will help to combine all this data and get better signal for sure. However, the quality of the data from the sites with more light pollution will affect the end result. So yes, it'll be better and normalised nicely, but there will be more noise and less signal compared to having all 9 hours at the darkest site.
