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.
I have had multiple times where I ran into an issue while doing mosaics that popped up when I did the RGB combine. I get an error about my files being too big! Right now I am working on a nice 360 hour multiple panel Cygnus area mosaic and I already know I am going to get nailed with it because I did a partial stack and got hit with that error. Please allow big file sizes and huge pixel mosaics.
This is a problem that did bother me at first, too.
But after three years my mosaic has grown to 141 panels now, the raw fits is - although downsampled to less than 50% of it's size - over 8 GB in filesize. Pixinsight crashes when I want to load this file on my MacStudio. I am at a point where I moght not be able to do proper postprocessing any more with a regular PC or Mac. Imagine if this was not downsampled, APP now needs 1.7 TB free diskspace for the integration-task and has to compute for more than 12 hours with 32 CPU-threads. Otherwise this would bring any computer to it's knees.
I now have to finish up my mosaic soon and find ways to process this image.
I'm just finishing up one that has 46 panels and is 512 hours and 15 minutes of total exposure. The master lights were about 2 gigapixels when fully integrated. I am running it through downsampling right now to see if APP will combine them or if I have to downsample some more. 36 of the panels were with a QHY600M doing SHO so a total of 108 master lights from that, and then another 10 panels from an FLI PL16083, so a total of 30 master lights from that. My computer can handle it no problem, and would handle it even better if APP would allow the use of more than 64 threads. I have noticed that normilization seems to have a hard time when you get to that size in places.
It would be fun to have a mosaic that is a couple gigapixels, but APP doesn't allow that. I haven't tried combining them in PI yet.
