Hi all,
I imaged these 3 objects last night while out testing a few things. Tested my new (second hand) 15mm Panoptic, which is now my favourite eyepiece
Tried autoguiding with my ETX90/LPI combo, which will go down as a failure, as the LPI doesn't seem to be sensitive enough to pick up enough stars
. Tested a tour I wrote and uploaded to my LX200, which was a success
I tried some new software out for processing these pics as well. Because I was using some 30 second exposures and staying on the target for 15+ minutes, I was getting quite a bit of field rotation, so registax gave me circular warp fields when I stacked them. I downloaded and tried out
DeepSkyStacker and used it to stack all of these images. It is a wonderful freeware program that does pretty much everything for you. A bit slow to process, but you don't even need to pick stars to lock onto for stacking, it automatically processes everything. Apart from stacking in this program, the only post processing was a levels adjustment in photoshop and a magic want for a dust mote (I really should take flats!)
M1 - Crab nebula 21x30 seconds
NGC 2392 - Eskimo nebula 17x30 seconds
NGC 2440 - 26x15 seconds - I didn't even notice the faint "butterfly" shaped nebulosity until I was in the digital darkroom, I only saw/noticed the part that I have now oversaturated!!!
Andrew, some good shots there, your Crab Neb shot is very interesting, it MAYbe a good idea to get yourself a comparison professional image with the crab pulsar highlighted as I think you may have it on your image
note I said maybe, I have compared your image to one on APOD and the bright stars near the centre of your picture and the Pulsar and they seem to match. 
