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.
The Voyager sequencing software allows very flexible scripting during an imaging session. It allows arbitrary scripting at almost any point in the imaging process. It would be pretty slick if Voyager could call APP after an image is taken and automatically calibrate it such that only calibrated images are saved.
Of course this would require taking flats at the beginning of an imaging session, but that doesn't seem unreasonable.
All APP would need is to be able to take in command line instructions like AstroPixelProcessor.exe -C -L "Light.fit" -D "MasterDark.fit" -F "MasterFlat.fit" -B "Bias.fit" -DF "DarkFlat.fit"
Or something similar.
Thoughts?
I think having some form of terminal access would be interesting, not sure how Mabula sees that or how easy that would be to intergrate @mabula-admin ?
Dear @kingjamez,
As you probably know, our company is now an official partner of iTelescope.net. As part of our cooperation, we are working towards the ability of APP to fully automatically calibrate and process up until integration of data captured by any capture software package.
Thus APP will capture the captured data and will start processing it. There really is no need for scripting here. That only complicates matters I think. It will be enough for you to load the proper calibration data into APP, then start imaging and let the capture software save the lights in a folder that APP would monitor.;-) This is the way we are planning this and the upside is that it will work with any capture package without the need for scripting. On the other hand, if we see clear reason for scripting for some reason, we will not hesitate to make that possible.
APP will even then create the integration for you once capture is completed. So APP in the future will do live stacking/integration of your data from calibration to integration... off course, we are not there yet, it will take time to get there.
Does this sound reasonable?
Kind regards,
Mabula
That would be an amazing solution... I LOVE IT. Thank you! I can't wait to give it a try.
-Jim
Dear @kingjamez,
As you probably know, our company is now an official partner of iTelescope.net. As part of our cooperation, we are working towards the ability of APP to fully automatically calibrate and process up until integration of data captured by any capture software package.
Thus APP will capture the captured data and will start processing it. There really is no need for scripting here. That only complicates matters I think. It will be enough for you to load the proper calibration data into APP, then start imaging and let the capture software save the lights in a folder that APP would monitor.;-) This is the way we are planning this and the upside is that it will work with any capture package without the need for scripting. On the other hand, if we see clear reason for scripting for some reason, we will not hesitate to make that possible.
APP will even then create the integration for you once capture is completed. So APP in the future will do live stacking/integration of your data from calibration to integration... off course, we are not there yet, it will take time to get there.
Does this sound reasonable?
Kind regards,
Mabula
Hi @mabula-admin,
I think a command line interface would be really useful for multi-session processing and also would allow really big datasets processing by being able to crunch in parallel some parts of the workflow (like: calibration, star analize... all the things that are done on individual subexposures).
I work for a project that maintains a open source platform for processing genomic data (www.arvados.org) and I think having a way to script the different steps of APP processing combined with an elastic compute platform like Arvados would allow APP adoption of astronomers that have enormous datasets. Even with not-so-big datasets, something like this would be great so that we can test different settings, re-running only the necessary steps.
Best regards,
Lucas.
