Apr 9 2026 APP 2.0.0-beta40 has been released !
It has a major performance boost of 30-50% over 2.0.0-beta39 from calibration to integration, for mosaics even faster! 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. Improved Outlier Rejection with LN 2.0 rejection. macOS CMD+A works now in file chooser ! And more, all will be added to the release notes in the coming hours...
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.
I am in the middle of a couple of projects tracking the asteroids Ceres and Pallas. I need to stack the images without integrating out the moving object. To do this I need an integration option that sums or maximises the FITS data, rather than averaging it. This should be a quick and easy addition. You would just need to add a new integration option with slightly different maths.
Deep Sky Stacker has a maximum integration option for this type of thing.
What would be really cool (but more complicated), is to be able perform two integrations and blend them. One integration of the background stars using median/average stacking, and one integration of the moving object using maximum or sum stacking. You could then use a winsor/sigma rejection map (or something similar), as a blending mask to combine the two integrations.
(N.B. What I am wanting to do is different from comet stacking. I want to see the moving object in its different positions over time against the background star field.)
Thanks a lot for this suggestion! I think this is definitely on the radar of Mabula as I know comet stacking is as well. Unfortunately it is something a bit more "down the road".
