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 APP a lot for Mosaics and it's pretty time consuming to stack each panel by itself first when doing 16 panels like i'm working on now, would it be possible to add a function to add all files and group each panel so APP would stack them all automatically without having to load each panel automatically?
Remember the time when we didn't have APP to create mosaics so easily? 🙂 Thanks for the suggestion, I'm not sure if this can be done automatically as APP doesn't know what belongs to 1 panel by itself. Maybe Mabula (@mabula-admin) has an idea on it.
It's still not easy doing large mosaics...it's pretty hard to get a flat field with a 4x4 mosaic.
Here's something i cooked up pretty early in the project for M31, i still have to gather RGB, Ha and probably add 2-3x as much luminance.
There's no MBB applied to this.
Did you use advance integration and LNC? Those should help with getting the frames equal. With easy I mean the calibration and registration, this used to be a process of hours/days just by itself before APP.
Yes all panels were integrated alone at first, just throwing all into APP would takes ages with 16 panels with 12-24 subs per panel.
I didn't use LNC on the integrations, i will try that and hope it gets better.
It should as that's one of the functions of it.
I just asked this in the general section as well, this would be a huge time saver, please consider it. APP's strength is Mosaics, this feature would solidify it's lead in this area.
/Yves
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I remember reading on the fora here that plate solving is on the feature list for a future update. This would be an excellent basis for the requested feature.
If I'm not mistaken, the normal registration of N images takes order (N-1) registration actions, but for mosaic registration it takes order N * (N-1) / 2 registration actions. With 34 panels (may latest mosaic) that's still feasible, but with 619 exposures (the total number in my latest mosaic) it would take forever. With plate solving, only order N blind plate solving actions would be needed to know where each exposure (or panel) is located on the sky.
Blind plate solving would help immensely to automatically group exposures into panels, or even allow proper identification of the location, orientation and scale of all the exposures in a huge all-exposures-in-one-go mosaic.
I'd love to help think about a means to set this up. Just let me know @vincent-mod or @mabula-admin if I could help in any way. I've been playing extensively in the past with my own homebrew stacking software (though never got as far as mosaics or distortion correction).
We do not need plate solving for the individual stacks ... the coordinates are already in the single subs ... Could be nice down the road to help with speed and accuracy though ...
For now it would be sufficient I could load all the subs of a 9 panel mosaic in one go and get 9 stacks out of it, instead of loading them 9 times individual and wait in between ...
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