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.
My hard drive is slowly filling up with RAW files from my Sony cameras. A single RAW file from the Sony A7R III is about 85 MB, and I have three different imaging sessions of M31, taken on different nights and locations, all with the same prime lens—adding up to several gigabytes.
I’m really tempted to use AstroPixelProcessor (APP) to integrate these RAWs into a single image—or at least one stacked image per session—but I’m concerned I might lose some reprocessing flexibility or data by doing this. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Never ever delete RAW-files and if possible, I would strongly advice to stack all subs at once and not per session if possible (which sometimes it is not)
/Stefan
Hi Pere @pereguerra and Stefan @digitaliz-se
I would suggest to keep calibrated light frames in FITS format provided the calibration is good/as expected. Otherwise, you will want to keep all the raws if possibly with the calibration masters/subs. The main reason is to have the data for future projects, for isntance, one year later, you will want to shoot the same target and then you can combine the data from 2 years to get hopefully a better result when compared to the data of only this or the previous year.
But, if your integrated file looks really good, it can be enough to only save that file and combine it with new data in the years afterwards. So it depends a bit on your own preference and a bit on the quality of the results I think. If you run out of harddisk space, you can consider a simple external drive such for storage of your data, so you can at least keep it for a long time if wanted.
Mabula
