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.
Hi Mebula, first I want to say that I use APP to stack all of my images and I find it to be very robust in handling many stacking situations.
Today I ran across ImageMM in a The Astronomical Journal paper by Yashil Sukurdeep, et al. They describe ImageMM as "a new framework based on the majorization–minimization (MM) algorithm for joint multi-frame astronomical image restoration and super resolution. ImageMM uses multiple registered astronomical exposures to produce a nonparametric latent image of the night sky, prior to the atmosphere’s impact on the observed exposures." Â
There are some discussions by a few individuals that this framework could be a game changer for image stacking. Also, an individual has incorporated ImageMM into his small suite of processes/programs. I do play on performing a back to back comparison of APP stack to this new method.
Would love to hear your thoughts. Thank you.
Hi Mabula,
I have used what I believed is the first implementation of the ImageMM integration method(with the setiAstro Pro suite) since it was released last week, and for me it has proven to be a significant improvement from the traditional integration way. The Integrated images are sharper from the start and this edge is maintained all through post processing, also after applying deconvolution software like BlurXterminator.
My approach has been to use APP all through registration and normalization, and then save the normalized files and load them into the SetiAstro suite's MultiFrame Deconvolution (ie the implementation of ImageMM) for integration. This has for me been a more successfull and efficient approach than to do everything within the SetiAstro suite.
The end result is the sharpest images I have managed to create with my equimpment( a C14 at F/7) so far. The improvements are significant enough that it will be difficult to go back to traditional integration.
The optimal scenarion of course is to be able to do ImageMM integration within APP 🙂
I could provide image examples if this is of interest.
Anders
Anders,
Thanks for bringing up the idea to use APP upto Normalization and use those images in SAS pro for ImageMM stacking.
I am a diehard APP user, but this gives new options as I got my graphics card activated (after some trial and error)
Hopefully Mabula will also give it a thought..
I would love to see this come to APP as APP is still by far the best program for integrating mosaic images. I do not get the same result when I integrate each panel separately then integrate together. Thus, using the Seti version, even if I work through normalization in APP isn't as good as being able to integrate with imageMM in APP.Â
