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Welcome! The first and only rule has to be to have fun.
For me a big part of the fun is understanding what is up there, trying to understand the physics of what I'm seeing, and trying to show something of that in the photos.
Let's give a concrete example. Let's say we've photographed a globular cluster. These things are about 10 billion years old. Most of the stars are very small and very cool, and therefore orange-red. Otherwise, they would not have lasted ten billion years. Hot blue stars last only a million years or so before exploding as a supernova. But a small number of the stars in a globular cluster have recently collided and merged, to form larger, hotter, and therefore bluer stars called "blue stragglers". So, if you show your globular cluster and you show all the stars as a beautiful blue, it should be a conscious decision to "tell a lie about what is up there", rather than just making a terrible gaffe.
Another example: Let's say we've photographed a face-on spiral. Most face-on spirals have a core of very old, orange stars, and spiral arms where new star formation is occurring. These will be reddish (from hydrogen alpha) with very strong dots and streaks of bright blue from exceedingly young, exceedingly hot and luminous OB stars which wildly dominate by being 10,000 times brighter than their friends. Then there will be black-brown dust lanes. If your photo of the galaxy is all blue, or all red, something is very wrong. You are not showing what is up there. But if you make it so that the galaxy is on average colour neutral, but make the blues a bit bluer, the reds a bit redder, the yellows a bit more yellow, that's not cheating. Exaggerate the colour differences until they are visible, but not garish. It's helping the viewer appreciate the astrophysics that is actually up there.
Unless you have at least some understanding of what it is that you are photographing, almost any manipulation in PhotoShop will be arbitrary and will lose information. Examples: clipping the darks to black loses faint detail. Clipping the brights to white burns out fine detail in shock fronts, and can convert subtle star colours to boring white. Over-zealous noise reduction will lose subtle detail and posterize the image. Over-zealous sharpening will produce all manner of hideous artifacts that are not actually up there, no matter how impressively "sharp" they might look.
So let a reasonably solid amateur understanding of what it is that you are photographing, and a desire to at least at first - until you are an expert - show what is truly up there - be your guide.
Once again, welcome!
Mike
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