Moon - Taken with 300mm Zoom Lens on my Nikon D50
The next step was to pull out my telescope, a Meade LXD75 which is a 6inch Reflector Telescope. I attached my camera, manually focused the image and took the following picture. As you can see the orientation of the image is not as you would see if through a camera, but if you want to pick out features and name them here is a really nice link which has an interactive map of the moon. Shutter speed for this image was even faster with the ISO set to 200. If you click on the link you can see the hi-res image. So while you may think the pictures look similar, trying zooming on the images and you immediately start to see the diference.
That said you can definitely start to take good quality pictures of the moon without a telescope or expesive tripod or remote control. The moon is incredibly bright, and fast shutter speeds with low ISO settings are usually fine.
Taken using a Meade LXd75 and a Nikon D50 DSLR
Did you do any re-touching on the photo taken with the 300mm lens? I was out tonight, and got a couple of decent snaps using a similar setup, but nowhere near the clarity/crispness of yours – good job!
I did remove colour but other than that I did nothing. I will post up the unchanged version tonight so you can see the exact shot. I can give you more details about the camera and settings if you are interested. There was a slightly pink overtone to the original.
-Paul