2026-10-09 APP 2.0.0-beta48 has been released !
This is mainly a bug fix release for the reported bugs in beta47. In addition it has a significant User Interface performance improvement noticable when you need to process 1000s of images in APP.
2026-10-03 APP 2.0.0-beta47 has been released !
This is a very big release... many code optimizations/rewrites, many parts of APP are much faster and more precise, especially star analysis and registration are much faster ! Big mosaics will go much faster 🙂
And we introduce a new preview filter, which includes the new Adaptive Deep Sky Stretch and a General Levels Stretch, this has been long over due. The old preview filter (the panel on the right side to stretch and preview your data) has not been updated for a couple of years and it is a critical part of any APP session.
Adaptive Deep Sky Stretch or ADSS is a much more intuitive stretch algorithm. It is also color preserving (which is a great new addition in itself ! ) which means that the highlights are no longer bleached, color is maintained from the linear data while stretching. You can simply stretch your data using the sky background level and signal width sliders which work much easier and more intuitive. You no longer need to fiddle with the old complicated sliders with zoom buttons. All the zoom buttons for the sliders are made redundant. And you can enter slider values in the slider value fields yourself. I will make a youtube video in the coming days to explain and fully introduce ADSS. Once the video is ready, it will be highlighted on the forum.
RGB Combine upgrade !. The RGB Combine Tool has been rewritten mostly. The tool is faster and easier to use and most importantly, the Luminance slider to inject a luminance channel or channels into the RGB composite is now working correctly. It no longer bleaches the RGB colors. Combined with the new ADSS preview, you will get much better and easier great composites with great color! I will also explain this in a new youtube video.
I use an Alt/Az system and APP is great as it easily integrates my the lights of my rotating frames (and with my unguided drift) with ease. Â The Multi band blending and LNC pretty much eliminates seams.
The issue is with my rotated frames and drift, I need to integrate in Full mode because "Crop to Reference" often crops too much because the rotation and drift creates a bit of a "mini mosaic" which is a useful end result that is almost always bit a larger than any one reference frame, usually 10% bigger in each dimension. Â However, some of my rotated frames with drift are far enough off to create a gigantic final output frame if I integrate with "Full" mode.
So what I need is the equivalent integrate "Full" but with limits on how big it gets. Â Perhaps like this: Â Not more than 10% larger than the reference frame (Integration mode: "Reference + 10%"). Â Or maybe 20%, perhaps a parameter to limit how big "Full" gets. Â I don't want it to be 2x larger (which is does sometimes) with 4x the amount of pixels because this causes a huge blowup in the stacking: Tons of intermediate disk storage and super slow. Â The slowdown is nonlinear... it's tremendous and I run out of disk space as it asks for 3-5TB of intermediate storage sometimes.
So think of it similar to Crop, but while crop is a contraction of the reference frame, I want a modest expansion of the limits of the integration frame size, a modest amount larger than the reference frame.
It seems with the ability to integrate to the "reference with crop" and "reference", and with "Full" this is halfway in between reference and full so perhaps not that hard, just a way to set a couple of parameters?
Interesting suggestion, I've moved it to the RFC forum. 😉 I'll also forward this to Mabula.
Hi Steven @readyjetty,
Thank you very much for your request. I think we can add this going forward 😉 I have added it to our ToDo list.
Mabula
That's great news. Â It'll make APP even more the go-to stacker for anyone with an Alt/Az system. Â Â
