I've been waiting for a clear, non rainy night, when the moon was out. Finally...

Here is my effort with $300* of DSLR and lens. Hand-held, with my 75-300mm stablised lens on my Canon DSLR.

To me at least it looks a fair bit better than Doug's camera managed (none of that significant chroma noise and digital artefacting for start).

Now, you're going to say "what DSLR and 300mm stablised lens can you get for $650". And you'd be right, you can't buy a new DSLR and that lens for that price.

However, my Canon 10D is over ten years old now and so is the lens. You can pick up the body and the lens second hand for well under $300.

It is "only" 6 megapixels. But it is still capable of taking better quality pictures than any point-and-shoot on the market now.

And yes, it doesn't have the flexibility within the same weight budget as Doug's camera. But to try and pretend that a flexible, light, point-and-shoot can match a DSLR (even a 10 year old one) on image quality is just wrong. The DSLR will win on quality every time.

I should point out, that unlike Doug's shot, this wasn't full frame. In fact the moon takes up probably less than a 60th of the frame. But if you are after a telephoto shot like this that doesn't matter. Cropping a 10 year old DSLR shot down to give you the same field of view as a zoomed in modern super zoom point-and-shot gives you a better quality (less noisy) result.

And of course DSLR sensors have improved some over the last 10 years...

P.S. my shot isn't as sharp as Doug's, but to my mind his has been overly sharpened by his camera, if I wanted to I could sharpen it up. Also, my shot was with the in camera JPEG conversion, if I had really wanted to I could have messed about with RAW, not that I ever bother to

P.P.S. that shot was 200 ISO f/8 1/250, I probably could have just about got away with 100 ISO and knocking it up another f stop to get less noise and more sharpness. A modern DSLR would have had less noise, more dynamic range and 4 times as many pixels to play with.