Hi Mabula,
Thanks for the reply. It is very fun to try APP and I see lot of potential.
I know that my Milky Way panorama is very challenging. At this moment, no any other programs can go as far as APP has. So even though the results above are not good enough yet, APP has already been far more successful than any other program. It is really wonderful to see this.
Since not many other people will try crazy mosaics like this, I do not think processing such mosaics should be your top priority. You should focus your efforts on other more useful features. At this moment, I am already very happy to recommend APP to my astrophoto friends. They should already find APP a wonderful program: very capable and yet reasonably easy to use.
Below are my suggestions/wish list for APP improvement/enhancement.
High priority:
1. Online help and simple explanation to each option. A full documentation will take time. However, at this stage, even some hint about the options can be useful to people who encounter APP for the first time.
2. warning of very big output file
(Not many high priority items here. As I said, APP is already very good!)
Intermediate Priority:
1. allowing for raw files from Sony, Fuji, and Pentax. (For example, my current workhorse camera is Pentax 645z. It will be nice if I can stack 645z images using APP.)
2. The freedom for users to specify the projection center, to correct for the bended Milky Way problem we saw above.
3. Fisheye, stereograph, cylindrical (or Mercator?) projections
4. both multiplicative and additive at the same time, for image normalization
5. Flat exposures can have separate dark files, as their exposure time can be very different from the light frames.
Low priority
1. capability to handle images a few times larger than 700 MP.
2. To allow to use a wide-field low-resolution image as a registration reference. Such an image can even serve as a reference for sky gradient subtraction and image normalization.
3. Dark optimization. Sometimes darks are taken under slightly different temperature. It will be nice if APP can automatically scale the dark to better match that in the light frames.
Cheers,
Wei-Hao