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.
Here is what they look like. Not sure what is causing these black squiggles as the subs, master bias, master dark, and master flats look fine. Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks!
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@rixon Many of the black squiggles have similar shapes which indicates that they are cold pixels that squiggle through the image due to drift during imaging. It could be that the raw lights show very short squiggles or single cold pixels, depending on how much drift happens during a single image. This seems to indicate that your flats don't fully correct the cold pixels or, if the cold pixels already show up as squiggles in the raw images, completely fail to correct for the cold pixels because they aren't pixels anymore but short squiggles. In the flats they would be single pixels so they'd be very hard to spot.
Hi Wouter, What settings should be turned on in the calibration step to prevent this?Â
@rixon First you'll need to inspect the raw lights to see if there are dark squiggles or only cold pixels. You can do that by inverting the image such that white becomes black and vice versa, for instance by exporting to TIFF and then opening in an external image editor. if there are little dark squiggles then you cannot correct those with flats.
However, if there are cold pixels (which should show up as bright single pixels in the inverted image), you can set the value of the integrate drop down of MasterFlat to a different value than "automatic". Then choose an outlier rejection filter and set the kappa low and kappa high values. When you hover over the drop downs, you get an explanation of what each setting does. You'll need to select the outlier rejection filter that applies to your amount of lights (which is what "frames" refers to) and then play with the kappa values until you get a good result.
