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.
Today i've made my first stack in APP and I m not sure if its good or bad. I followed Mabulas tutorial ( DSLR data calibration-workflow) and get the result you can download here -> https://drive.google.com/open?id=1YuTLRZgz5v221Dpe28XQV8iVw3I_Fa6C
First edit:
The pics were made with a modded Canon 6D and a Samyang 135mm 2.0!
Lights: 41 / Darks: 18 /Bias: 18 / Flats: 18
The flaws I've found: 1) The light pollution in the center 2) The star-trailing in the corners ( not visible in the lights)
Can you please give me feedback?
CS Gernot
Well, first of all I think it's looking very impressive, so that's good. 😉
The star trailing is probably due to the lens, they always have some distortion especially if they are not crazy expensive. You could crop the corners or just take it as a matter of fact. I'm not sure if correctors exist for these type of lenses, with telescopes one uses coma-correction and or expensive glass to correct for distortion.
Regarding the light polution, did you try using the Light Pollution correction in APP? You might try to place some squares on the darkest parts in the middle and some across the field where there isn't nebulosity. Did you do any processing using other software?
I tried this, not sure if it's really better, but I think the right hand side came out a bit better (stars in your stretch look a bit glued together on the right). LPC seemed to work pretty nice.
I stretched selecting the 10% BG, 3 sigma, 2,5% base. I just tried a few of those standard options to see what comes out best.
Hello Vincent!
Thank you for your feedback and ideas 🙂 This is my first deep sky-pic I've ever made and the first time I'm using APP that's why I'm not that experienced yet.
The stack in the drive folder is unprocessed and the pic in the link was processed with Photoshop ( Astro Tools Action Set and levels adjustments).
I don't understand the LP-Tool yet... I don't know were to place the boxes !? I watched Mabualas tutorial but it didn't help me a lot!
CS Gernot
Oh well, if this is your first deepsky-picture than it's very impressive! Mine was miles away, quality wise. 🙂
The LP-tool is pretty straightforward, you can place the boxes over stars as APP knows not to look at those for the background. With a lot of luminosity it's always tricky to get it right, but I just started placing them on the darkest parts which I considered to be light polluted. You then click on the "calculate" button and it show you the result. If you don't like it, you can cancel it and start over on different places. When you're ok with it, you can save the result.
Regarding Photoshop, I suspect those tools might have caused the stars on the right hand side to look a bit funny. The above result I got straight out of APP. It's always a good idea not to over-process an image.
Maybe I used the "make stars smaller" action to often... I think this is causing the funny looking stars!
Would you still change something on the raw-stack?
Today i've made my first stack in APP and I m not sure if its good or bad. I followed Mabulas tutorial ( DSLR data calibration-workflow) and get the result you can download here -> https://drive.google.com/open?id=1YuTLRZgz5v221Dpe28XQV8iVw3I_Fa6C
First edit:
The pics were made with a modded Canon 6D and a Samyang 135mm 2.0!
Lights: 41 / Darks: 18 /Bias: 18 / Flats: 18
The flaws I've found: 1) The light pollution in the center 2) The star-trailing in the corners ( not visible in the lights)
Can you please give me feedback?
CS Gernot
Hi CS Gernot @skanker
First of all, this is really an excellent result to start with 😉 like Vincent ( @vincent-mod ) indicated as well. For only 4000 seconds (a bit more than 1 hour) exposure time, this is quite okay !
Like Vincent indicated, the light pollution needs to be fixed with the Remove Light Pollution tool. You need to select areas which contain only sky background and stars. The areas must not contain nebulosity or luminosity surrounding galaxies for instance.
The star trailing is probably due to the lens, they always have some distortion especially if they are not crazy expensive. You could crop the corners or just take it as a matter of fact. I'm not sure if correctors exist for these type of lenses, with telescopes one uses coma-correction and or expensive glass to correct for distortion.
If there is optical distortion (which almost all objectives and telescopes have, even very expensive ones... ) it could be the cause for the elongated and bad stars in the corners of your result. The solution is to enable Dynamic Optical Distortion Correction in 4) Register. That should fix it or at least make it less worse.
If the optics have slightly bad stars in the corners due to otpical aberrations like coma, then optical distortion correction won't fix that.
Kind regards,
Mabula
Hello Mabula!
Thx for the detailed answer!
I' ve tried the DODC but it didn't help! I think the distortion is caused by the lens.
Here is my final result:
Slowly I'm getting warm with the light pollution- tool 🙂
Greets from austria!
Gernot
Looking really awesome, and not just because it's your first.
Yes that’s very nice!
Thank you 🙂
