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.
(CCD) FITs files saved by Sequence Generator Pro can contain Ra+Dec center of frame information that APP can use to speed up the mosaic process.
Hi Kees,
Thank you for this thought.
The Ra-Dec center could certainly help in solving how all panels are related, but to actually make the mosaic, APP (or any other program) would still need to find the star pairs between the frames. So if it would help in reducing time of the mosaic calculation is doubtfull.
The longest part of calculation of a big mosaic, like yours, is also not related to this. The longest part would be the multiple view calculation, where APP finds registration and distortion parametes for all frames all at once. When this calculation start, APP already knows how all panels are related.
The biggest improvement in calculation time for the multiple view algorithms should come from improved algebra and improved formulation of the mosaic registration problems I think. (I am working on both)
I will however keep your suggestion in mind. Plate solving for instance is a feature that I will certainly add to APP at some point, then APP could find RA-DEC values for all frames and wouldn't depend on the information in the metadata. In that case, we could start using plate solving for mosaicing, but to get everything registered correctly, one would still need the multiple view calculations to get all camera parameters and distorion parameters correct for the mosaic as a whole.
Mabula
