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.
Especially during this time of the year (without dark skies at my place), but always if there ist some gradient by moon or simple light pollution, i experience weird quality scores that may be an issue (or not) in selecting/ordering the "best" frames for integration.
Since the quality score seems to be correlated (an it surely is dependent) on star shape/size and noise, it is higher on images taken at dawn/dusk, because stars are "smaller", noise is "lower" (because of higher background levels).
So, if i do want to have these images in my integration stack but dont want to emphasize their impact on the final image. What can i do? There are two measures that clearly are opposed to quality score, namely "dispersion" and "sky background". Both can't be selected manually if selecting a manual average integration. (And this surely is not a good thing to do?)
To illustrate my observation have a look at the following screenshot showing 6 different nights ready for integration.
As i know it would be best simply not to take broadbad images during moon or summer nights and drop images taken at dusk/dawn, is it possibe to use those in the final stack without having them identified as "best" images by quality score?
My bad.
I did start new and put every night in a different session. This time I got very similar quality scores. I did not know that this makes such a big difference. Will give this another try tonight posting the different settings and scorecharts. Just to get a feedback what i did wrong there...
Well my first post showed the results normalized "multiply" - because of images taken on different nights with strong gradients.
If I set it to "multiply-scale" (which is not advised for strong gradients!) the results seem much "better", at least the images on dusk/dawn are not as prominently high quality scores as "multiply"...
I will give it a try, what the resulting integration may look (as it is a 2-panel view i was not able to remove the remaning gradients in the first integration)
