Rich,
thanks for the advice! I'm going to stick with the 40d for now, but I'll read FM and see what the others are using.
Walt,
yes, but my exposure time is going to increase a great deal and that's a problem. My scope is polar aligned via an equatorial mount, but getting it exact on both axis is a major issue. If it's not perfectly aligned you'll get star trails/streaking on anything greater than 20 seconds. This was shot at about 50 seconds and you can tell my scope is not perfectly aligned due to the slightly oblong shape of the stars(it's really, really close, though). To magnify the nebula 2x my exposure time would be 4-5 minutes for the same results(roughly)which would most certainly show serious streaking, again due to lack of perfect equatorial alignment. This thing's 5200 light years away and my scope is a 2032mm focal length.. I'm not even going to get into the trouble it would take just to locate/focus the thing with another 2x and a major narrowed FOV/ lack of light.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equatorial_mount