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Just an update I had a more serious look at APP on the weekend, only slightly distracted by the arrival on friday of my lego Saturn V rocket order at last. My focus was on taking my subs and producing a single Integration frame ready for post processing. I'd carefully taken notes from vids and the forum on how to do this well.
My Integration frames turned out as good or even better than those produced by PixInsight. Its still a little clunky process but then so is PI but far easier to get your head around than PI. When you dont define the reference frame to register to APP will analyse frame quality and pick one as reference and pixel peeping the result there was a small but noticeable improvement with the APP result. This I found was because APP was able to use all my subs, while PI wasn't able to use some that were poor quality (vibration interferred). So I'm looking forward to throwing some really bad data at APP and see how it copes, where PI wasnt able to register the subs.
So for now I'm confident to switch to using APP for producing my integrated data and then stretching in PI.
I havent touched stretching in APP at all yet, am going slow and careful, taking notes as i learn.
It didn't crash at all once all weekend. And reading the forums and thinking about the early crashes i had i think they were due to using it incorrectly.
One new plus is it warned me before starting my latest integration step that I needed to free up 622GB drive space for it to be able to build the integration frame, whereas PI would just plough ahead and crash or abort once the drive filled up. Definitely a plus to know if a process is going to finish or not before heading to bed.
The more I use it the more I like it. Being able to select a light frame and preview how it will look with flats/darks applied is handy too. Mosaics come out nice and flat too, I had a small set of 5 frames I'd taken when trying to find/frame a target one night. in PI I couldn't align them, only two but APP aligned all 5 in a mosaic as there was small overlaps, but enough. Which is great. I need to test if it can be plate solved properly though.
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