G'day all thanks for looking, and the nice comments.
Mike i have tried 16 and 8 bit tiff to jpeg in pscs2, also in m$oft digital image pro to resize my images.
I think the problem is cutting a 50-70 mb image down to 150k, and doing that without any jpeg artifacts seems a no go for me anyway.
Thanks for the i.d. Lester
O.K. Octane it's a deal, worked out postage to your door 1st class at $5500, not including insurance
Well spotted Paul, i have way overprocessed this image though, so it isn't as noticable in the normal image.
I have uploaded a higher res image here
http://www.southernblueastro.com/M45%20wide.jpg
Only slight adjustments have been made to this one, about 1.5 meg.
should notice the difference in quality between the 2 pics.
Thanks again all for your comments.