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It's a lovely image, Chris. Well composed and captured. I think you could get some more detail out of the brighter parts of the moon though. I hope you don't mind, but for my own curiosity, I downloaded the image and had a play with it. I hope that's not rude of me; I don't know what the etiquette is about such things. Maybe I've gone too far - it may not be to everyone's taste. Maybe it looks a little more 'fake' and less true to what you would actually see through the eyepiece.
Let me explain how I butchered your lovely image; I often find in my own photos that the moon has a lot of contrast between the highlands and the mares. When setting the contrast curves for the moon as a whole, I often find that I either get highlands that are a little too light, but if I darken them, the mares become unnaturally dark. Typically I will separate out the mares and the highlands in two separate masks so I can apply separate contrast curves to each.
So, when I had a play with your image, I decided to see if I could tweak a little more contrast out of the lighter portions of the image. In photoshop I used the wand, or 'select color range' to select only the brighter highlands and created a mask with a little feathering. Then I added some more contrast in 'curves'.
After that, I collapsed the layers and did the 'Highpass trick' to the whole image; Copy the layer on top of itself. Set the top layer to 'overlay'. Select Filter/other/Highpass. I used 1px as the threshold. The effect was a little strong, esp. around the limb, so I erased the limb area from the top layer so you see through to the original layer beneath in those sections. Then I changed the opacity of the highpass layer to 50% to lessen the overall strength of the effect.
So that's what I did. Again, I apologise for mangling one of your images, but I think it coaxes out a little more detail. But again, possibly it's a little unnatural. Perhaps others will have more suggestions on how to deal with the contrast issue between highlands / lowlands in lunar images?
Cheers
Markus
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