Thanks guys. I put the differences down to equipment and processing.
Previously I would battle with collimation (which seemed to slip as soon as I slewed to a new target
), inconsistent focuser slop/tilt, diff flexure with guiding, residual coma in the image corners and an undersized secondary mirror. In comparison my new scope seems to hold collimation extremely well and produces a fully corrected and properly illuminated image circle. I am now using a Robofocus unit with Bahtinov Grabber, which makes accurate focusing a breeze. A lightweight but rigid guide scope setup has improved my guiding performance. I also recently sourced a Shoestring DSUSB which means that I can now utilise dithering between subs to further increase the SNR.
On the processing side, the biggest change was moving up to Pixinsight, which allows me to extract so much more from my image data than what I was able to previously.
