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.
14:08:19 - 6) INTEGRATE: integrate light frames: LNC: starting Local Normalization Correction...
14:08:19 - 6) INTEGRATE: integrate light frames: LNC: turning off LNC, can't get sample size
What would cause this?
Ok, so this can be a number of things;
- The number of frames you're trying it on is too low (how many are you using, how much overlap do they have?)
- The LNC setting, how did you set that (at what value?)
- The number of frames is so high, the calculation becomes too complex, which is not yet possible (like when using 10000 frames or something like that).
Thanks, Vincent
@vincent-mod thanks
Mosaic with 1600 frames over 10 sessions 🙂
I'm currently using a small tracker so exposure times are short. Waiting on my Losmandy mount to be built so I can get some decent exposure times.
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Ah yes that's likely it then. You can also make sets of your data, so first integrate 1 panel then the next etc. and only after all panels are done, you make the mosaic. That will likely work for LNC.
APP ran for a week and the result was unusable without the LNC. Ran each session separately and then combined and that only took a couple days and the results are great.
Did run out of memory attempting star reduction on the 1.2GB fits file with 26GB RAM dedicated to APP.Â
Running the tiff through Starnet++ instead.
Excellent to hear Steven! Bit unfortunate for the reduction, Mabula is working on also getting the load on the system better with this module.
@vincent-mod I just got the "turning off LNC, can't get sample size" on an integration of 5,215 lights. I hate to stop the integration at 49%, but should I? Will the result be unusable? Also, what is the max number of lights I should try to integrate?
Sorry for the delay, bit busy down here. Over 5000 lights is maybe a bit much to do at once, I would combine data in such a case, like going for the integration of 500 at a time and then combining those results with each other.
I understand. Thank you for getting back to me. Amazingly, the stack completed in about 60 hours and the result was fine.Â
Hi @Susan Fortney
The max amount of Lights is heavily depending on Your hardware, especially RAM (size & speed) and CPU performance. I have successfully processed up to 700 lights with 24GB of DDR3 RAM.
Also the degree number of LNC isinfluencing RAM requirement / processing time strongly. Try to start with 1st degree (maybe just 100 lights) and watch the console to get a feeling how long it takes for 1 iteration to go. Running 700 lights or more on 2nd degree with 3 iterations is an overnite job (give it 8-10 hours or so), so You should make sure all other adjustments are great before trying LNC (which should be just icing on the cake for normal shots).
As a rule of thumb, with each degree step, calculation time increases by a factor of around 400% for each iteration.
You also need to be aware of disk space as APP requires several 100 GB as swap memory to push and pull data from. Therefore a fast SSD should be used here Increasing number of lights will also eat that swap memory faster, so clean Your Disk (or use a fast external) for such job. Once You see the HDD indiator in red territory for too long, APP is likely unable to continue the job successfully.
Please note, LNC is a single-core code, hence depending on the single core CPU performance only - A recent INTEL or Apple Silicon based machine really helps. Apparently multi-core/thread code is in the works which might speed this up in future APP versions.
Hope this helps, Clear Skies
Jochen
