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.
2026-10-03- UPDATE FROM MABULA
I am glad to announce that I am finally fully healed, my energy and strength are really back now !
In the past 3 weeks while recovering, I have prioritzed the release of 2.0.0-beta47. So much work has accumulated into this release that it needed to be tested extensively, but also it needed to be available for all of you. Unless a big problem is reported for this release, I expect it will be the final release, finally !, before the official 2.0.0 release.
Hi  Mabula
It will be nice if we can sort the image list based on values on a specific column.
For example I may want to see the sort list with the quality score with ascending or descending order.Â
Thank you.
Donghun
Hi Donghun,
Thank you for this suggestion 😉 I will add this to the sorting possibilities that you can select in the 1)LOAD menu. Okay?
And I will add the possibility to have both ascending/descending as a choice.
Kind regards,
Mabula
Hi Mabula
Yes that works.
If APP sorts the list when you click the column (first ascending and the second click descending), it would be ideal but the load menu way will work as well.
Thank you very much.
Donghun
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Hi Mabula,
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I'm used working with PixInsight and the request Dong Hun made is a kind of mixture between PI's process "blink" where I was able to load a list of images and could play them one-by-one or as in a kind of movie. I used this process a lot to pre-select my light frames in order to reject the ones with bad guiding or incoming dawn when the signal was fading into the upcoming daylight. There's also another script called "subframe selector". With this script I could sort out the frames on FWHM value, SNR etc. It would really be nice when you could make something like this -a kind of best-of-both-Â
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Keep up the good work! regards, Jeroen
Thank you Jeroen for your contribution 😉
The frame list panel should indeed help in sub frame selection.
I intend to create sorting of the frame list on
- star density, helps you filtering subs due to bad atmospheric conditions (tranparancy) on a image scale indepent way
- noise, APP calculates noise after having normalised the frame, so this is a normalised noise value 😉 see note below
- relative FWHM, helps you select the best frames relative to the image scale of the reference after registration. You need this when you combine data of different focal lengths and/or image scales
Furthermore in 6) INTEGRATE, we have the "lights to stack" slider. This uses the values in the quality colomn. It will be usefull if the values in the quality column dynamically adjust for the integration weights that you use. So if you set the weights at "star shape". Then the "lights to stack" slider will enable you to directly filter on the sharpest and roundest stars 😉
Mabula
note on normalised noise: this is much better than sub selection on noise on frames before normalization. Noise is by no means an absolute value to be compared without normalization!
(If I were to divide data by 2, then the noise drops by the same factor, differences in flat calibration between different applications, for instance, will create different noise value outcomes.. This mistake is made a lot actually... comparing frames using only a noise estimate without normalizing the frames really has no meaningfull value.)
