Apr 9 2026 APP 2.0.0-beta40 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 will be released which works much better and faster than LNC in it's current state. Improved Outlier Rejection with LN 2.0 rejection. macOS CMD+A works now in file chooser ! And more, all will be added to the release notes in the coming hours...
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 would love to see a comet stacking mode in APP. Both stacking the comet itself with allowing the background stars to move, and for stacking both stars and a comet to have a fixed star field with the comet in it.
Yes, it's in the planning but for a later version. Top priorities now are HDR, noise reduction, saving settings and such.
Sure would be a much welcomed addition
Agree, would be such a welcome addition with Neowise in the sky now... 🙂
Has anyone figured out an alternative method of comet stacking on a Mac? I have 55 Neowise subs that I'm itching to stack and it is not proving to be easy.
Yes, now I have Neowise images to stack! 🙂
Yes, absolutely great time to implement it now, yesterday!
how else to proceed? Register in pixinsight with comet alignment process and load these into APP and then step 4 "no registration"?
Align / register for the comet in another program (DSS or PI), then save the registered files and stack in APP without registration... is this working?
PixInsight produces XISF files which APP cannot read. I am not sure if you can tell PI to save the images in, say, TIFF format but if you find out how to do that then you should be able to load them into APP for further processing.
On the other hand, this comet doesn't seem to move very quickly so why not give it a try and see if you get a blurry comet or not? This is what I get with 12 images of 10 sec each using a Canon DSLR camera and a 135 mm lens. Not a perfect image, mostly due to the light pollution and the house in the foreground, but the comet seems sharp enough to me.
sure you can do that, here 30 times 60 sec with 135mm, lots of bg reduction
still, best would be to register on comet and stars seperately
I was wondering if a planetary stacking software like registax could do it....
You can do a comet stacking in PI and save it as fits, which APP can read. You can use APP for calibration purposes of the single frames and save those. Then use PI for comet alignment and APP again for its nice light pollution correction tools. As long as you keep it in a fits format or something else APP can read.
