my first attempt at the m31

Really great capture and first attempt too!.........I'm drooling over the keys of my laptop here, well done :-)

Many thanks Horatio i was a bit worried about posting it as ive seen other cracking images others have taken but we all got start somewhere i guess,to be honest it brought a smile to my face when i first saw it on the monitor during the first preview exposure, i need help on levels and curves and the histogram i just dont really understand it and its just a case of moving the sliders but it would be nice to know what they actually mean.thanks again for your kind comment.

If my first attempts had been looking like that, I'd have been happy. :)

As to curves and levels, they bring out highlights, midtomes, and shadows (bright, medium, dark areas in the pic).

Curves are interesting because you can set points on them (with the eyedropper tool you can measure the darkness, brightness of things). I'm not an expert, but what I do is measure a dark point on the sky, set the value in curves (what you dio is click shift (or ctrl) when you are on the desired value, and have curves up, and it sets a point), then, set another point directly on curves, eg. my value is 10, then set another point @ 20). This "fixes" the darkness level, and you can cheerfully work away on img. details. I don't know whether I'm explaining myself well, maybe this helps:

http://www.photoshopessentials.com/photo-editing/levels-curves/

Clear skies.