News on the APP site!

Activity Forums Astrosoftware Astro Pixel Processor News on the APP site!

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  • #15575
    Theunissen
    Participant

    Astro Pixel Processor will be released on 2 June 2017 around 12:00 CET!

    Finally, after several years of hard work, I am going to release Astro Pixel Processor to the world!

    Final preparations, that are needed to launch, are almost done…

    The development of Astro Pixel Processor, or simply APP, will continue in full force, thanks to the valuable input of the Beta Team…

    A very big thank you!

    goes out to all the Beta Team members:

    Yves van den Broek, Rob Musquetier, Marc Theunissen, Vincent Groenewold, Kees Scherer, André van der Hoeven, Wei-Hao Wang, Scott Rosen, Hans van Overzee, Maurice Toet, Tom O’Donoghue, Olly Penrice, Kayron Mercieca, Dominique Dierick, Marco Verstraaten, Jos Wennmacker, Roberto Colombari and Adri Groot Nuelend.

    and

    https://www.starry-night.nl/

    for hosting the Beta Forum.

    #15576
    Musquetier
    Participant

    That is great news! I’m sure it will be a huge success. So far it has produced excellent results for me. My photo quality has increased quite a bit since I start using APP! I especially for mosaics it does things no other software can perform today!!!

    #15577
    Haverkamp
    Participant

    Indeed ! I will launch APP this Friday, still working very hard to get everything ready ;-)

    I will launch the new version 1.041 today as well together with a new update of the Quick Reference Guide.

    APP now has a separate console window, as requested by the beta team and off course some more bug fixes and improvements to the user interface.

    The forum at my own site will open Friday as well ;-) I will enable read acces to guests as well.

    BETA TEAM, thank you very much for all your help until now, I hope this first release is just the beginning ;-) of our work together!

    #15762
    Haverkamp
    Participant

    Hi all,

    Time for an extensive update on the current status of the Astro Pixel Processor project and where I would like to go from here ?

    Public Launch

    • As you are all aware, I have made APP public, everyone can register for a 30-day trial license now and after the weekend I’ll make the price of APP public
    • Currently, almost 100 trial license were requested and most photographers had no problem in installing and activating APP on their systems. Most of these users have launched and used APP several times in the past week. The first results have been published on some international fora including some small  mosaics even
    • Some photographers had trouble with receiving the license code e-mail, this e-mail is being sent from the license server (which is a different server than were my website/platform is hosted). Google still marks these e-mails as spam unfortunately. So I placed a big warning on my site for GMAIL users. This seemed to  help a lot ?. Other mail servers don’t mark this is spam, google seems to be the only one as far as I know
    • Only 1 user isn’t able to install APP sofar. It’s a photographer form Bussan in South Korea. His system is a 64bits Windows 10 Toshiba notebook. For a reason, currently unknown to me, the windows installer doens’t finish so nothing is installed, because windows cleans the installation due to not being able to complete the installation. I am still investigation why it doesn’t finish. Windows doesn’t give a warning and the installer does not show an error. We have checked if it’s due to a anti-virus, security, firewall software. But it doesn’t seem to be the issue, since after disabling everything, it still fails. (I have installed APP on several windows 10 machines myself without problems.) The windows packager for the installer is : Inno Setup 5. I’ll investigate if the current version of this packager application could be causing this issue. If anyone has any experience in this regard, please let me know.

     

    Beta fase not ending:

    Due to miscommunication between Marc Theunissen and me, Marc posted on Starry Night the ending of the Beta fase. To be absolutely clear:

    The beta fase hasn’t ended.

    Your help is vital in making APP more mature and robust as a Deep Sky Image Processing Application. I simply can’t do this without your help ? and feedback.

    If you feel that APP isn’t worth your time and/or effort please let me know as well. Then other photographers can take your place which are willing to participate.

    Extension of BETA licenses

    Initially, I created all BETA licenses for all members of the group for a period of 3 months. This means these licenses would expire within the next couple of days.

    • Today, I have extended all active BETA licenses until the 1st of October 2017.
    • If you aren’t interested anymore to be part of the Beta group, let me know, so I can revoke your license.
    • If you stay active and are willing to further participate in APP’s development I will keep on extending the license ? as my way of thanking you.

     

    Launch of APP’s platform and forum

    First of all, I would like to thank Marc Theunissen , owner and developer of Starry Night, for having hosted the private Beta Forum on his platform. Marc, thanks a lot ? !

    To be able to have one central place for questions and issues, regarding APP, for all the APP users worldwide I have opened my own forum as you are probably aware of. So some things will change or have changed already.

    From now on, please post your results, issues and questions regarding APP on my own forum at: https://www.astropixelprocessor.com/community/

    With your Astro Pixel Processor user account on my site you will have access to my forum. If you are not logged in, you only have read rights.

    Further development

    I hope all of you have experienced that APP has changed quite a bit from the initial BETA group launch and I think for the better. There are still quite a few known bugs to solve and completing documentation is the current main priority.

    I feel that APP currently is one of the best programs out there to do the main task of image integration. For post processing, I clearly have a lot more work to do ?

    I want to focus on having all steps from calirbation to integration as good as we possibly can, before working on and extending the post processing tools. I would love to hear your comments about this.

    • Regarding calibration it’s clear to me that it should be more flawless and automatic, including good dark scaling.
    • Registration of mosaics, I will upgrade the mosaics algortihms with completely newly written algorithms soon. Mosaics of 4-16 panels seem to work very well, but larger mosaic calculations are unstable as it is. So I am going to reformulate the mosiac problem to make it more robust.
    • Calibrated projective mosaics will see the most improvements which is needed for widefield mosaics, including different projection methods.
    • Registration of comet data, I will start work soon on this as well, I’ll try to aim for a completely automatic comet detection. (simple to say, very hard to do)
    • Integration, I need to work on speeding up outlier rejection, especially linear fit clipping, but I do want to warn everyone, that Linear Fit Clipping basically is redudant if you apply Local Normalization Correction.
    • Deconvolution is a feauture that I want to implement soon as well, but with a big twist compared to current implementations in the other known applications (it can be done much smarter ? I think)

     

    Contact

    Because of the launch of APP, it’s practically getting unworkable for me to respond to facebook messenger with questions or feedback. So from now on, I strongly request all of you to get in touch with me using either e-mail (mabula@astropixelprocessor.com) or my own forum.

    I will stop responding to facebook messenger chats, because I have often experienced that several people at the same time are sending me facebook messages. This is not ideal at all, it’s rather messy for me ;-(.

    I hope you can all respect this and be assured that your feedback and questions will be seen, read and responded to.

    Current active Beta team members:

    Marc Theunissen

    Yves van den Broek

    Rob Musquetier

    Dominique Dierick

    Vincent Groenewold

    Kees Scherer,

    André van der Hoeven

    Wei-Hao Wang

    Scott Rosen

    Hans van Overzee

    Maurice Toet

    Adri Groot Nueland

    Tom O’Donoghue

    Kayron Mercieca

    Marco Verstraaten

    Jos Wennmacker

    Some members that initially showed interest, actually never installed and/or activated APP on their computers. I have disabled these licenses since they didn’t participate. If they do want to participate in the future they know how to contact me to get started.

    Possibly, I can add new beta members upon request.

    Kind regards,

    Mabula Haverkamp

    Aries Productions

    mabula@astropixelprocessor.com

    https://www.astropixelprocessor.com

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