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'm trying to integrate a small detail taken with a long focal length scope with another image of the same object taken with a wide FOV scope/camera. I can get APP integration to finish, but it's not merging the two images. I have multi-channel/filter options set to integrate all. Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks!
Here's an answer Mabula gave recently, I think you can load the integrated results of both FOV's into 1 session.
Mabula's details:
What i would recommend is the following:
1) just like a mosaic, make integrations per field of view first for the different telescopes.
2) use the wide field image of the apo as reference
3) set scale factor in 6)integrate to such a factor that you preserve the pixel scale of the longer focal length data. That factor is simply :
image scale short focal length data / image scale long focal length data
4) If the wide field image contains all objects that you shot with the long focal length, you don't need to use mosaic registration, you can use normal registration mode.
5) in star analysis, you need to bump up the star count to 2000-3000 probably
5) in registration, increase scale stop to a higher level until registration works of all frames, if the data is diificult, it might be needed to use triangles instead of quadrilaterals.
6) In integrating, i would simply us the quality for weight, it will prefere the data with the best stars probably, otherwise, use star shape as metric for weights.
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That's great information. Thanks Vincent and Mabula!Â
However, my FSQ106 with 16803 camera has a pixel scale of 4.74 and my long focal length camera/scope has a pixel scale of .62 arcsec/px. which comes out to a scale factor of 7.645.Â
APP only goes up to 3.0.
So in my case, would this huge difference in pixel scale be out of the range that APP could process properly?Â
I'll have to ask Mabula about that as I never combined those scales before.
Ok, so it is indeed tricky with a factor of over 7, you'd have to tweak the register options. It's important that the widefield has a lot of identified stars and the scale should then be increased, try triangles instead of quads and when you see distortion happening, increase the distortion margin a bit as well.
Could you maybe upload the data that you want to combine? It would be very nice for us to test APP with. Just the integrated results per telescope is fine, do make sure they are the linear stacks, no other processing.
