MAY 4 2026: APP 2.0.0-beta44 has been released !
New improved internal memory controls should now work on all computers
May 1 2026: APP 2.0.0-beta43 has been released !
Improved internal memory controls (much more stable and faster on big datasets), fixed CPU image viewer, fixed Narrowband extraction demosaic algortihms.
Apr 29 2026 APP 2.0.0-beta42 has been released !
New improved Normalization engine, Fixed random crashes in integration, fixed RGB Combine & Calibrate Star Colors, fixed Narrowband extraction algorithms, new development platform with performance gains, bug fixes in the tools, etc...
Apr 14 2026: Google Pay, Apple Pay & WeChat Pay added as payment options
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.
There is currently an initiative to make better use of the TIFF format for astronomy.
The idea is to save a FITS header in a standard way into a TIFF file. This makes conversion between TIFF and FITS possible without loosing header information.
The FITS header is stored in the description tag of the TIFF file.
The specification is here:
http://www.hnsky.org/astro-tiff.htm
Benefits:
- The TIFF compression algorithm makes the files smaller
- The files are readable by almost any image viewer.
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The standard way is intended to be used for light, dark, flat and flat-darks. These files are normally written in large quantities and compression and viewability makes sense.
Already some application developers are working on support. See the list at end of the specification in above webpage. For APP the only requirement would be to read TIFF and decode the tag description containing the header information in a string and decode information like date, exposure, gain, sensor temperature.
The specification is not set up as a replacement of FITS. It just propose better of use of the existing TIFF file format.
Han
www.hnsky.org
