I'm relatively new to photography so I decided to do some research, and now I'm driving myself crazy. I have purchased a Canon EOS camera for my girlfriend at one time and I decided that possibly I may need something a little bit better so I've been looking at the Nikon d500 and just working down the line but every time I get online to look at some further information about some other cameras i get even more confused..... I'm lost. As I said I'm somewhat new to the Hobby and I'm wondering if that 500 is just a little bit too much for me I do want a full frame camera that much I do know. Anybody have any suggestions please please let me know so that I can go even crazier. That being said I've learned in the past that you get what you pay for

Nice shots but with your camera and lens you could do much better with little effort. I generally don't criticize pics posted on UHH but I've taken many moon shots and I can see you are just a few minutes away from a much better shot. I'll just speak of shot two, I think shot one was pretty good.

Shot two.. I think your settings are off. f6.5, iso 100 would get a better image. Use M mode. As far as the shutter speed, use the live view lcd and start at 1/200 sec and raise the shutter speed until the live view shows a contrasty image with the darks prominent, and the lights dark enough so you are getting as few blown highlights as possible.

I can see there's a lot of details that post processing would bring out on your shot, but the over exposed bleached white areas are not recoverable. You can use post processing to bring out detail on an under exposed shot, but an over exposed shot can not recover the blown highlights.

Attached is a pic I took with my Coolpix B700, f6.5, iso-100, 1/500 sec. to illustrate the things I mentioned above.