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.
Astro Pixel Processor 2.0.0-beta13 release notes
- UPGRADED development platform to GraalVM 22.3 based on OpenJDK 19
This upgrade enables us to further optimize APP processing speed and memory usage going forward. We have also adjusted the internal memory usage and cleanup.
- IMPROVED integration frame and weights loading giving significant performance boost !
We have optimized the loading of frames and their weights into the integration engine. This part was a big bottleneck and this improvement greatly enhances the integration performance and performance overall of Astro Pixel Processor. For regular integrations without Drizzle nor Multi-Band Blending, the speed increase overall for APP is about 30-50%. With Multi-Band Blending enabled, this increases to 50-75%(so almost twice as fast). And with drizzle enabled for 2.0X scale, the spead increase is very big, roughly 2-3x faster ! All depends on the image dimensions and available hardware resources. Computers with a lot of CPU threads will see great speed increase and users with big camera sensors will really benefit here 🙂 Below you will see some graphs of testing for integrating 120 frames with calibration masters with 32 cpu threads and 32GB of RAM:
- IMPROVEMENT framelist space bar select/deselect
You can now use the space bar to select/deselect frames in the frame list and this works on multiple files at the same time.
