I learned if you want to take a properly exposed photograph of the moon, go out during a bright sunny day and get a meter reading of the street. Set your camera for that light level and then use that shutter/exposure combination on the moon.

It will come out perfectly exposed. Don’t just use the light meter on the moon itself, because the camera will try and average out the black sky and bright moon and the moon will come out overexposed.

The trick also works at the beach. If you want to take a picture of someone standing in the shade under an umbrella on white sand in bright sunlight, take your meter reading by walking up to your subject and setting the exposure for their shaded face. Then walk back into the sun and take your shot. The face will come out perfectly exposed, although the beach will come out over-exposed.

The albedo (which my spellchecker wants to make Alberto) glare overwhelms the stars, as described in my “Overwhelmed” post on this same thread.

For instance, the Moon actually has a slate-gray surface, but reflects brilliantly at night.

The initial photo was just a really cool shot from an old New Horizons story I was reading, probably posted before any shots were actually made for Pluto. The spectrum shots from the mission that I posted are far, far more exciting.

Haven’t been everywhere — yet — but I’ve been around.

This is why photos and movies of astronauts on the moon or in spacewalks never show any stars. The stars are there all right, but you have to stop down the camera so much to get the astronauts that the stars don’t show up in the picture at all. If you opened the shutter wide enough to see the stars, the astronauts and their surroundings would be totally overexposed: a featureless white glare.

Military used a spotter scope on a tripod in the ’70s~’80s that was very cool to operate. Acting as a low-power telescope that magnifies light from the night sky, the sometimes-glaring image comes up on a small cathode ray tube under a cover. The glares would be simply a matter of albedo effect, light and dark shading in a nighttime environment. But let one guy out there light a cigarette, and the scope’s down for a full minute trying to recalibrate to the night.

Just 15 minutes after its closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft looked back toward the sun and captured this near-sunset view of the rugged, icy mountains and flat ice plains extending to Pluto’s horizon. The smooth expanse of the informally named icy plain Sputnik Planum (right) is flanked to the west (left) by rugged mountains up to 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) high.

…amends is here:

This is a composite photo of enhanced color images of Pluto (lower right) and Charon (upper left), taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft as it passed through the Pluto system on July 14, 2015. Here, Pluto and Charon are shown with approximately correct relative sizes, but their true separation is not to scale. The image combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the spacecraft’s Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera.

Keep in mind, we are at the edge of the solar system, there isn’t that much light available out there. The imaging system would have to be designed to operate at very low light levels. The detectors would be overwhelmed by bright objects.

Perhaps it is a composite image put together by an artist, using the spacecraft imagery?