[Closed] Astro Pixel Processor 1.049

Astro Pixel Processor 1.049

• FIX for WINDOWS Operating Systems with usernames that contain non-standard/cyrillic/non-english alphabet characters. APP can now be installed without administrator rights in a location of your choice so the user can avoid an installation path with non-standard characters. At the beginning of the installation the user will be warned:

WARNING FOR NON-STANDARD/CYRILLIC CHARACTERS

PLEASE READ CAREFULLY !

Astro Pixel Processor (APP) installation location instructions:

APP can be installed without administrator rights on the Operating System (OS) and will be installed by default in the OS user's application directory:

C:\Users\[your OS username]\AppData\Local\AstroPixelProcessor

If your OS username contains non-english alphabet/cyrillic characters like for instance é, ż or japanese characters, then installation into this default location will finish, but APP won't be able to start.

To have a working APP installation in that case, please adjust the installation location to a location without these non-standard characters. For instance:

C:\AstroPixelProcessor

Then the installation will finish and APP will be able to start and work properly.

Kind regards,

Mabula Haverkamp
Aries Productions
support@astropixelprocessor.com

• FIX FITS LOADER, some fits files made by other application like Nebulosity & ACP, don't properly follow the NASA fits conventions for creating tags in the Fits header. They sometimes make the STRING tags longer than 80 characters and forget to close with an '. This is very bad and the NASA fits library nom.tam.fits wouldn't load these frames due to badly created fits headers. Now these files can be loaded due to a fix by the developers of the nom.tam.fits library (which is run in a NASA project). The error introduced by other applications isn't an error that should prevent the data from being loaded properly, so the errors are now ignored and the images are loaded properly.
• FIX CHANNEL ALIGNMENT RGB data calibration, the channel aligner will remove chromatic aberration in RGB data as part of data calibration. The files that were output could have different image dimensions than the originals. This is no longer the case. The frames have the same image dimensions after channel alignment.
• FIX BPM creation, BPM creation failed when APP was provided with already debayered RGB calibration frames
• FIX BPM creation, the BPM creation now has improved statistics for detecting the hot pixels. This new method will work better with sensors that have signinficant dark current and amp glow. So try to create a new Bad Pixel Map with this new version if your sensor has significant dark current and amp glow.
• IMPROVEMENT, TIFF frame saver, if you save 32bits FLOAT data as a TIFF, you'll get the option to choose the bitdepth between 8,16 Integers or 32bits floats. This can possibly help in conversion of APP 32bits stretched data to 16bit stretched data for import into another program like Photoshop.
• IMPROVEMENT, TIFF frame saver, if you save 16bits Integer data as a TIFF, you'll get the option to choose the bitdepth between 8,16bits Integers.

• IMPROVEMENT, complete rebuild of the RGB Combine tool, the tool is now integrated into the left control panel. When loading data, you can assign from which filter/color the data is or if it should be treated as luminance. The channel assignment for L,R,G,B data, will be automatically set to 100 to start with. If you load an RGB image, the data is automatically split using Red, Green, Blue assignment. And fixed a minor bug in the calculation of the total values. Overall, the use if this tool will be much more user friendly now.

• BIG IMPROVEMENT, in star analysis, the "limit #stars to" parameter has been made redundant. This setting used to be necessary to prevent Out Of Memory errors. Due to better/smarter use of algebra algorithms, APP can now register images with 10.000 star pairs between them without using a significant amount of memory.  This will be really benificial in all sorts of situations where registration is difficult. Making mosaics becomes much easier now, because the amount of stars that APP can use, in a 2-view registration, is no longer limited by the amount of memory that APP can use.

Image shows at the top: star count/ density and registration RMS + registration star pairs. Bottom left: CPU usage (showing efficient usage) during star analysis and registration. Bottom right: memory usage, which is now very little, especially in registration of 1000s of stars between frames.

Notice the 2 periods in the graphs, first is star analysis, second is the registration with optical distortion correction.