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.
Not a fault of APP, but I wondered if this community can help...
I'm seeing these artifacts in my flats which aren't in dark or bias frames. They're in every frame so are ruining my masterflat. I've done flats fine before, but this time I've been making them with the flat function of asiair, a light panel, and with the l-extreme filter in. Exposures are about 2.6sec. I can't figure out what's changed - I normally don't have the filter and use ekos to good effect, but I can't imagine why asiair or the filter are causing this. Appreciate any ideas.
-Mark
This is a crop of the flat right? If so, those would be hot pixels I think. Are you using dark-flats to calibrate them?
@vincent-mod yeah its a crop. I haven't got dark-flats, just using bias frames (I use dark-flats for my 1600mm, but this is with a 533mc which I didn't think had the same problems with bias frames?), but neither the bias or darks show these as hot pixels which I can't understand - why would they only show up on the flats?
It's wierd that they're showing up in a particular patch in the flat, hopefully you can see that in the included full image.
-Mark
Oh, that looks really odd. Can you show me the fits header of this flat and the unstretched histogram maybe? Also, what's your process of taking flats exactly?
@vincent-mod fits and histogram attached...
My process is I have a Gerd Neumann flat panel and I'm using the flats autorun in asiair. Unlike doing flats in ekos, there isn't much in the way of configuration with the asiair so I don't know what ADU it aims for, but it iterates as expected and the flats look pretty well exposed by eye and it's coming in at 2.6 seconds which seems reasonable. I have captured the lights in the day (albeit with CCD cooled to -20), so I guess it could be a leak in the optical train, but I would have expected that to show as a bright area rather than these tight hot pixels.
Is the histogram unstretched? You can do so by going to the right and selecting "no stretch" as preset. If it is, the exposure seems a bit too low and maybe clipping on the left a bit. You'd want it to be in the middle or slightly over. Also, dark-flats may be interesting still, maybe for some odd reason, you have a cluster of bad pixels on the sensor, showing up at 2.6 seconds.
@vincent-mod Thanks - I didn't realise how to do that. Here's the unstretched version. I think I'm going to have to do some experiments - get ekos hooked up and see if its asiair, try different voltages on the light panel etc. I guess I was hoping for a quick fix due to user error 🙂 Thanks for your help Vincent
And the histogram of the masterflat? I believe that should be gray and not have a colored histogram.
@vincent-mod The masterflat is also a 16bit RGB image. The histogram doesn't look much different
I was mistaken, it can be rgb, sometimes my brain is shorted. 😉 I think it's best to have a look at the data, would you mind uploading it?
Go to https://upload.astropixelprocessor.com and for the username and password, use: upload
Create a directory named “ennui2342-flatsIssue” and upload in there. Thank you!
Just to follow up on this for future astrophotographers finding this thread... With a new imaging run I looked into it again and it seems the auto flats feature on the asi air is producing flats of about 40-50k ADU. I've taken my flats with a manually set exposure to hit my normal 25k ADU and I don't see any artefacts on the masterflat. I'm assuming I was at full well on places because of the high exposure time, so if you have a similar problem this might be worth trying.
-Mark
