Mar 28 2026 APP 2.0.0-beta40 will be released in 7 days.
It did take a long time to have the work finished on this and it will have a major performance boost of 30-50% over 2.0.0-beta39 from calibration to integration. We extensively optimized many critical parts of APP. All has been tested to guarantee correct optimizations. Drizzle and image resampling is much faster for instance, those modules have been completely rewritten. Much less memory usage. LNC 2.0 will be released which works much better and faster than LNC in it's current state. And more, all will be added to the release notes in the coming weeks...
Update on the 2.0.0 release & the full manual
We are getting close to the 2.0.0 stable release and the full manual. The manual will soon become available on the website and also in PDF format. Both versions will be identical and once released, will start to follow the APP release cycle and thus will stay up-to-date to the latest APP version.
Once 2.0.0 is released, the price for APP will increase. Owner's license holders will not need to pay an upgrade fee to use 2.0.0, neither do Renter's license holders.
Astro Pixel Processor 2.0.0-beta22 release notes
- IMPROVED Memory Usage
Further tweaks have been made for internal memory usage using Oracle GraalVM JDK 20 after extensive benchmarking. Memory should be lower and more stable giving more data throughput while latency is also managed well.
- IMPROVED MASTERFLAT CREATION SPEED 2-3x
MasterFlat creation and analysis from a batch of flats was rather a slow part of APP compared to the other processing steps from 2) Calibrate to 6) Integrate. So we have now optimized the loading of flats, analysis of flats for normalization and the final masterflat analysis. This leads to a significant boost of processing speed. The actual masterFlat creation is about 2-3x faster now depending on the image size and the number of flats. For a complete processing path from 2) Calibrate to 6) Integrate, APP will now only take about 70-85% of the time that was needed before. So you can argue that APP is about 1,2 - 1,35x or 20-35% faster roughly as a consequence when you process a dataset including flats. The actual performance gain does depend a lot on the amount of flats and the image dimensions and cpu threads in the system. This was tested with both OSC and well as monochrome data.
- FIXED 0) RAW/FITS settings behaviour, especially Bayer/X-Trans algorithm
Beta20 and beta21 had a regression bug on the Bayer/X-Trans algorithm setting. If you changed it, you were forced to restart at 3) Analyse Stars instead of 5) Normalize. For data shot with dual, triple, quad narrowband filters, this was very inconvenient because extraxt Ha and extract O3 integrations were not registered correctly out of the box. This is now fixed again. If you change the demosaic algorithm you only need to restart at 5) Normalize and thus you will preserve registration parameters. Only if you change the demosaic algorithm to or from Super Pixel, you will be forced to restart at 3) Analyse Stars because then it is vital to do so.
- FIXED, save Multi-Band Blending (MBB) % setting
The setting was not saved and thus restored when you restart APP. This is fixed.
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