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.
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I have been shooting a mosaic of 6 panels of IC 1805 with an Optolong L-Enhance Filter over a period of time. I managed to create the mosaic with the Ha-OIII color algorithm. Then I wanted to separate in an Ha and an OIII image so I could merge them with a specific RGB palette. So I started to create 6 Ha panels and 6 OIII panels with the intent to create a single Ha Mosaic and a single OIII mosaic and then merge both images. Extracting the first 5 Ha and OIII panels went ok, but the 6th failed to create an Ha image. Then I went to have a look at the quality scores of the different extractions and noticed that the OIII quality scores were in line with Color quality scores, but that the Ha scores were almost opposite to the OIII and Color scores. I have created graphic of all three scores (great that we now have this information btw). Can anyone explain why the Ha data is behaving like this?Â
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As a side note): my dew heater was no functioning properly., so when I came back in the morning there was dew on my lens. This may explain why the quality of the overall picture went down, but it only makes me curious why the Ha score then went up???
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Hi Tom @tvanpeer,
Thank you very much for sharing this. I think I might know why this happens with the quality score, it has to do with data normalization. Can you check how the quality scores relate if you use another normalization method in 5) Normalize? Probably with additive, it will look more logical.
Mabula
Hi @mabula-admin,
I would love to try the suggestion you mentioned, but the process already fails at registration, so before normalization.
Hi Tom @tvanpeer,
Oh, there was no mention in your initial post that even registration is not working? Did you enable the cosmic ray/noise reducer in 3) Analyse stars? Maybe that will solve it, APP might think that hot pixels/noise are stars and then registration will fail and the quality scores are not correct since stars are not detected properly. Set the noise reducer in 3) to a value of 10-16 and it should work. If it does not, please let me know.
This issue with locking on to noise instead of stars is on my list to fix.
Mabula
