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.
The simple way to use APP is great for a few images - you manually select lights, darks, bias etc. Then it runs and makes calibrated frames, then let you stack them. It's great!
However, at the end of a good night I will have thousands of frames, which need to be calibrated, then the subs stacked, then the stacks assembled into a mosaic.
Essentially all of this could be automated, either with features in APP (which might already be there) or by scripting APP.
If I have the images organized into directories (one directory per panel), I am not sure how to tell APP to do this. A simple way would be to able to select a whole directory tree for the lights, and then have APP put the calibrated frames into separate directories. I have not figured out how to do this, is it possible?
So, the directory structure would look like
lights\ panel 1
panel 2
....
darks
bias
...
APP would then make
cals\ panel 1
panel 2
....
The next step would be to stack each panel. Is there a way to have APP run over a set of directories and stack each directory?
More generally, this entire process has the potential to be scripted. Is that possible?
At the moment you then would need to select your working directory as the directory in which the calibrated files go and load in the lights from where you want.
We don't have scripting in APP no.
OK, even if you don't have scripting within APP, can you use other software to tell APP what to do?
No, APP is going to make it possible to watch a folder, so when data goes into that folder it automatically processes it. That's in the works because it was needed for iTelescope. Further possibilities may come in the future, I don't know of the planning on that though.
Did the 'watch folder' feature ever get implemented?
Not yet no, we've been focusing on other issues that had higher priority, but we are looking to get this working as well.
@nlondonlad, goign forward we will make this possible. We need to focus now first on other priorities like releasing 2.0.0 stable with load/save settings and projects 😉
