Apr 14 2026: Google Pay, Apple Pay & WeChat Pay added as payment options
Apr 12 2026 APP 2.0.0-beta41 has been released !
It has a major performance boost of 30-50% over 2.0.0-beta39 from calibration to integration, for mosaics even faster! 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 has been released which works much better and faster. Improved Outlier Rejection with LN 2.0 rejection. macOS CMD+A works now in file chooser ! And more...
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-beta42
- Upgrade development platform to Oracle JDK 26
JDK 26 has several nice improvements for performance of APP! The garbage collector, the system that frees memory after object allocations, will now instantly free the memory of our images once we no longer need them. Previously, the garbage collector needed still to perform analysis before freeing these large parts of memory. With instant release, performance of APP is definitely improved overall. We will perform some benchmarks, but when running APP, the improvement is very noticeable. Please see this for technical background from Oracle: https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8048180
Another free improvement of using JDK 26 is more technical, it relates to how the internal garbage collector works. It is described in JEP 522 : https://openjdk.org/jeps/522 . Simply put, APP's performance instantly improves another 5-15% is the indication. Â We will test performance and show performance difference with the previous version before we release it.
- Image Normalizer is further optimized
The image normalizer is the module that applies normalization parameters to an image. By optimizing this, performance overall is again increased, especially in 2) Calibrate (flat normalization), 5) Normalize and 6) integrate where images are normalized. OSC/RGB data will have a nice performance gain.
- Fixed ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException in FindBestRegistrationModelÂ
As reported here https://www.astropixelprocessor.com/community/main-forum/arrayindexoutofboundsexception-in-findbestregistrationmodel-while-registering/#post-34227 an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException could be thrown when registering in the FindBestRegistrationModel module. The issue will be caused when dynamic distortion correction is enabled. When disabled all works as expected. The issue would manifest if APP tries to calculate distortion correction on data that really does not need it for already perfect registration. The issue is now solved and prevented by simply disabling distortion correction completely in the 2-view registration phase on data that has very little movement in the stars between the images. The user can simply leave distortion correction enabled, internally, APP will disable it for the specific registration task.
