Pendleton, OR
ASG Observatory
NGC2244
IC405, IC410, IC417, NGC1931
NGC 3372
NGC 1499
NGC7000
M45
Horsehead & Flame Nebula
Barnard 33
Astro Pixel Processor provides a very sophisticated tool for stacking images and creating mosaics. It’s real strength comes in its updated formulas and calculations with normalizing and mosaic building. 
When building your mosaics in APP, you follow most of the same workflow as stacking regular images, however, APP offers some very powerful tools when it comes times to integrate.
Local Normalization Correction (LNC) is offered in varying degrees from 1st degree to 8th degree normalization. Typically a 1st degree LNC pass of 3 times is sufficient in my experience when using the same optics, cameras, etc. to take your subs. If you have a varying results you can increase/decrease the passes and degree at which you run LNC until you find a good balance.
Multi-Band Blending (MBB) is another amazing feature in APP that lets you blend those edges and it does an excellent job. What used to be a hard task in Photoshop to really get smooth has been automated in APP and using very well developed algorithms creates a beautiful mosaic.
Other very nice mosaic features:
Astro Pixel Processor walk through in making a full 2×2 mosaic panel in narrowband monochrome.
Below are some sample mosaics created with APP to showcase the different popular calibrations.
This is an Astro Pixel Processor mosaic without any benefit of MBB & LNC. The lines are pronounced and the banding very noticeable in a raw stacked image of Ha, Oiii, Sii and then combined into an RGB.
This is an Astro Pixel Processor mosaic with a standard MBB blending at 10% and Local Normalization Correction 3 times in 1st Degree. This has produced a very good blending of the quadrants and very little noticeable artifacts on the edges. This is very low data acquisitions in Ha, Oiii, Sii, so with more data the middle of quadrants will deepen.
This is an Astro Pixel Processor mosaic with a standard MBB blending at 10% and an extra 4th degree Local Normalization Correction with 3 passes. It produced very little improvement in this case to the overall results but we also have very little data and also shot with the same optics and camera. One of the really good features of APP software is you can configure this area and bump up the passes of LNC and MBB to your needs based on your equipment and data.
Before doing processing, I run them through StarNet to create a nebula image and a star image for my processing.
We can easily subtract one image from the other to create a star layer and nebula layer in photoshop.
Last step was to process the image in Photoshop for final stretches and curves. I always process these in hubble colors so I do adjustments in photoshop to the overall color and calibrate it to my liking.
88×300″ subs were taken in Ha, Oiii, Sii 7nm filters over 7.3 hours of integration total. Telescope was a 70mm Quadruplet running a ASI1600mm monochrome pro with a William Optics 50mm guide scope and 290mm mini camera for guide duty. I used an ASIair for planning which will do quadrants and auto-slew to targets, filter changes, and exposure lengths as well as multistar guiding.
This is a 2×2 mosaic processed in Astro Pixel Processor. Each panel was individually processed, then they were all processed together as a mosaic with 4 final integrated images to produce this final single image in Ha, Oiii, Sii. The 2×2 mosaics in each monochrome were processed as 3 images to produce aligned registered images for IC 1805.
Astro Pixel Processor is one of the best tools out there for stacking, calibrating, and creating mosaics with astro images. It is the bedrock tool you need before you even dive into processing and creates that base you need for image creation.
If you have any concerns about whether it is worth purchasing, considering the time, resources, and cost in most astrophotography setups; it is a no-brainer that using the right tool like APP to create a base image set usable for the final processing is well worth it’s weight.
I have moved from Deep Sky Stacker personally into APP mainly from trialing and have been sold on it’s performance and features.
Read our full DSS vs APP comparison or check out Astro Pixel Processor site below.