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 just noticed the 1.083 has a new feature to batch edit FITS metadata for correcting headers like BAYERPAT or INSTRUME.
This is nice, I used to use 'astfits' and a bit of bash magic for this. However, I was wondering if there could be a quick win to build on top of this feature, the batch removal of Personal Identifiable Information (PII) from FITS files.
As it is, many capture programs write data into the FITS files that one may not want publicly available (like the rough GPS coordinates of your house/observatory) and this impedes the sharing of raw image data on public forums for the privacy-conscious.
Likewise, services or collaborative efforts that collect donated data from amateurs technically find themselves subject to the EU-GDPR due to collecting these data elements that are technically PII.
We could avoid all this if the data in question was easier to remove (via APP for example)
I was thinking about these keywords specifically that could be batch-stripped from the FITS files:
- AUTHOR
- OBSERVER
- LATITUDE
- SITELAT, SITELONG
Maybe there are others, this seems to be poorly standardized.
Hope to hear your take on this,
Benny
