This telescope is proving really troublesome, and I really hope it will ultimately be worth it. Samuel has been trying to collimate the secondary mirror for several hours, on two nights. Not only would the pinching not really go away, but getting a good collimation was a frustrating and ultimately futile effort.
I’ve been told that it’s extremely unlikely that the primary mirror was pinched and/or uncollimated, but there’s no way that fiddling with the secondary mirror for over 6 hours would yield no acceptable result.
In the following image you can see the extent of the decollimation. It’s pretty serious.
Stacking 46 frames helped, because with many images having been acquired after a meridian flip, some defects averaged out, so the stars are less misshapen albeit more bloated.
Now I have no choice than to ask to AstroCamp folks to start fiddling with the primary mirror, and hope for the best.