Remote data from China.

Love APP and the work you're all doing just wanted to get some feedback!

Today, I am getting the warning (attached screenshot). I have not changed any of the integration settings. What has suddenly gone wrong?

If I click OK, the programme proceeds at a snail pace.

Please help.

• FIXED 4)REGISTER comet/one-star 

  As reported here https://www.astropixelprocessor.com/community/comet-registration-and-integration/beta-41-comet-registration-issues/#post-34307 the comet/one-star regisgtration mode had several issues with data that has little stars and low quality (shot in the morning glow). We have fixed 4 problems so now the data can be properly processed. We have fixed 2 bugs related to little stars so the images might not be able to register on the stars. We fixed the counter of which image is being processed in the comet mode and we also added a warning message if star registration is simply not possible and the user should try to disable star analysis and the register on the comet only.

Running SuperPixel vs AAD, the former has much blacker background and whiter objects (this proves the issue is with the algorithm), however I want the full resolution.  Maybe we can try AHD or VNG to see how they look, or better yet, a revision on AAD like AAD2.  

I am working on MBP M4Pro Max and if star analyser and registration is faster, normalization (non overlap) is very slow compare to past versions. 

I preprocessed something close to 700 images R, G, B, S, H, O and normalization took a much longer time than before (maybe something close to 1-2 seconds per image. Before these last versions the time for 700 images was very fast (several seconds for all). Images have 100 Mpix (Moravian C5)

Anyway, there is something I don't understand in the reasonnement :

Why normaization reflect to the reference image ? As if a red image is reference, all S, H, O will be normaliezd along this red one ? 

The real (or optional) procedure should have each stack get normalized with its own reference. Usually I find a green image to be set as reference. There are lot of stars and maybe some gradients or huge signal on it. If I take for example the OIII ones, signal is very low and I don't understant why it is normalized with the green reference. 

Please explain if I am wrong

Best,

Philippe

• FIXED NEW MEMORY CONTROLS / FASTER AND MORE STABLE ON BIG DATASETS

  We have further improved the new internal memory controls. APP should have lower latency now and should no longer stall/pause/freeze while processing big datasets. This fix should ensure that it works on all computers now.

  To make APP run faster and more stable on big datasets, the new memory controls can no longer fragment the internal memory of APP. That caused the slowing down of APP in older versions. Latency of the application has improved as well. When APP starts now, it will report how much memory it can use safely without compromising the stability of the Operating System. It reports the maximum memory and also a soft maximum memory value. While processing, the soft maximum memory should not be crossed unless APP really needs the memory for a very intensive memory task after which it can never cross the maximum memory threshold. After any task, APP should also gradually release the used memory again back to the Operating System. On computers with little RAM memory (less than 16GB of RAM), the soft maximum and maximum will almost be equal or equal. On systems with plenty of RAM (more than 64GB of RAM), the soft maximum will be fixed at 32GB of RAM which should ensure fast and stable processing without consuming too much memory which can slow things down.

This is a further improvement over the below release note from beta43, this change and improvement should now work on all computers.

• IMPROVED INTERNAL MEMORY CONTROLS / FASTER AND MORE STABLE ON BIG DATASETS

  As reported here : https://www.astropixelprocessor.com/community/main-forum/randomly-stopping-freezing-during-integrations/#post-34236 APP could stall/slow down or even freeze when processing big to very big datasets (500+ frames). The lastest APP releases have many code optimizations making it quite a bit faster, but the memory clean up internally was not able to keep up with all the GigaBytes of data that were processed. The old memory controls internally were fragmentating the memory causing these instability issues now and more quickly as well. Luckily, we are able to prevent this fragmentation completely by using a very different memory configuration internally. Technically, we have switched APP from using java's default G1 garbage collector with many G1 tweaks to using the more advanced Z garbage collector. This proves to be much better for data throughput and stability. Processing big datasets should not slow down APP at all anymore after having done several 100s of  frames in integration.