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.
I often use Dual NB filters on my OSC set up, and use the Extract Ha and Extra Oiii options to create Ha and Oiii integrated subs. I then use these in the RGB combine tool.
When I use Ha, Oiii and Sii filters, the RGB combine tool knows to assign the right channel/filter.
Given APP has just done the extraction for Oiii and Ha, and naturally the next step would be to combine, still using APP, you would expect the software to know to assign the right filter to make HOO processing that little bit easier. It's a small change, but a welcome improvement for the inexperienced.
I may be missing something, but APP does add a filter tag when you've used extract-Ha or OIII right? In the RGBCombine tool you can then select the algorithm you'd like to use, which is just a preset, if we make assumptions there I'm not sure that will work for everyone. Your point is that APP would then automatically select HOO I think?
When you load the raw FITS from an OSC, you assign a filter - it defaults to RGB, but you can change it.
So this means I have both Oiii and Ha on this same labelled filter.
When you go to Extract the Oiii or Ha, this filter doesn't get changed. The filter for my Oiii extracted image is "RGB", the filter for my Ha is the same "RGB" (or in my example, I loaded and assigned ALP)
For example, I named the filter ALP to represent the filter I used on my camera at the time. When I go to extract the Ha or Oiii at Integration, I have to knowingly insert Ha or Oiii into the filename otherwise there is no indication at all what the FIT file is when I load them into the RGB combine tool. See attached screenshot. The only reason I know it's Ha is because I named it Ha.
The simple request here is that - given APP created this extracted file, it should include/alter/update the Metadata to now reflect the Filter or some other field that RGB tool could reference so that people aren't making mistakes. Here, in the screenshot, you can see the channel description is (relatively) useless at this stage, and filter is set to Custom.
A user, at this stage, given APP created this file, and we're doing an action from APP itself on a file itself produced, I should just be able to add these automatically to this tool and it knows what filter/colour to assign where.
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