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.
I did remember or hear correctly that the next APP update will include a star removal tool?
If so, will I be able to remove the stars, do my processing, and then add the stars back after?
The reason for asking is my WO Redcat scope always leaves me with halos around bright stars in my image and I have been researching for some time now ways to remove the halos. By removing the stars and only leaving the nebula and halos in the image, it would be possible to "heal" or "blend" out the halos (using other software) and then adding the stars back to the halo-less image.
I have read that this is possible with PI and PS, but I have little to no experience with those. Wondering if something like this is coming to APP?
Hi Damian,
Well, APP now is in beta with a star reduction algorithm which is being improved upon. It also allows for star removal and in the future something like putting back stars is likely possible. It's not yet though and may take some time. At the moment people indeed do this with PS, PI, but also try the "remove stars" from APP and then put stars back using PS. I personally never did that so you'd have to find an online resource for that unfortunately.
