June 24 2026 APP 2.0.0-beta46 has been released !
Improved internal memory configuration (lower ! memory usage), fixed beta45 startup issue, fixed Set Save Directory & 2-panel mosaics.
May 27 2026 APP 2.0.0-beta45 has been released !
Fully Multi-Threaded LNC, many improvements for the registration engine, platform upgrade, and further tuning of internal memory consumption and memory release back to OS.
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
