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.
We can load (master)calibration frames separately for each session, but the session information is lost for BPM in the frame list. Therefore, BPM-1 is always selected, even when BPM-2 is loaded for a particular session.
I found on another forum that this is due to the fact that BPM-selection (contrary to all other calibration frames) is done off the "Camera" or "Instrument" tag. Problem is, when combining two sessions, shot with different camera's of the same make&model (for instance my friend's ASI2600MC and mine) this tag contains the same factory information.
Workarounds are to manually update the camera-name in the fits-header, or to calibrate and save each session separately before restarting APP, loading all the calibrated frames, and continuing to step 3) analyse. Both seem extremely cumbersome, and also quite unnecessary. The whole point of multi-session processing is to not needing to do that.
Hi Petra @petelaa,
Thank you very much for your request.
Yes,.. I understand that you will run into this issue when you try to combine data from 2 physically different camera's where the camera tag happens to be the same since the camera model almost always is the instrument tag and users themselves rarely change that in capture software or hardware if they can change it even at all...
It is true that the BPM selection uses the instrument tag currently.
I have added your request to our issue list to change the BPM loading/recognition and make it work the same as the other masters, so you can always load different BPM per session and/or channel.
Once implemented, I will let you know 😉
Mabula
That would be great Mabula, thanks.
And I do realise that this is a small change, compared to alle the big updates you’ve been making lately. Thanks for those!!!
