I recently brought out the OTA from my old Nexstar 8se and decided to put it to use this galaxy season.
I have installed a new CGE Dovetail Bar, ZWO 533mc Pro and Starizona SCT Corrector. I shimmed my back focus to the 90.3mm as recommended.
OTA collimation set by airy disk is very good and sensor tilt has been adjusted out, using my homebuilt laser collimator. I am guiding with a ZWO OAG-L and 174mm on a tuned SkyWatcher EQ6R-Pro with guiding averaging around 0.70-0.80 total at the 1450mm focal length.
With all that said, I am getting tailed stars, BUT... only on one side of my image and only on the larger stars on that side!
While not extremely pronounced, you can see in the tight crop below, they are enough to ruin a 300 second lights, 5 hour stacked image.
Coming from imaging with Newtonian Astrographs and APO Triplets and not having this problem, this one has me absolutely puzzled.
Thanks for any suggestions!

I have installed a new CGE Dovetail Bar, ZWO 533mc Pro and Starizona SCT Corrector. I shimmed my back focus to the 90.3mm as recommended.
OTA collimation set by airy disk is very good and sensor tilt has been adjusted out, using my homebuilt laser collimator. I am guiding with a ZWO OAG-L and 174mm on a tuned SkyWatcher EQ6R-Pro with guiding averaging around 0.70-0.80 total at the 1450mm focal length.
With all that said, I am getting tailed stars, BUT... only on one side of my image and only on the larger stars on that side!
While not extremely pronounced, you can see in the tight crop below, they are enough to ruin a 300 second lights, 5 hour stacked image.
Coming from imaging with Newtonian Astrographs and APO Triplets and not having this problem, this one has me absolutely puzzled.
Thanks for any suggestions!


