I've never taken pics on the Moon. FACT!
But you can take photographs of the moon as a way of learning the problems of photographing a bright moon and stars at the same time. You can do one or the other, not both.
Keying off of this a bit...
Right now, the moon is waxing gibbous and is visible during the afternoon when the sun is still up.
Now, think about this for a minute - the
moon is visible while the sun is up. No other object, not Venus, not Jupiter, not any other star, is bright enough to see while the sun is still up. Their light is too dim to cut through the sunlight scattered in the upper atmosphere (it also helps that the moon is an area light source, not a point, so it's throwing more photons at you anyway). That's kind of the situation happening on your negative - the stars are simply
too dim to register compared to the lunar surface.
The sunlit surface of the moon is something like fifty
thousand times brighter than the next brightest object in the sky, far beyond the dynamic range of any film to handle (and that's as viewed
from Earth - the situation would likely be even more extreme on the lunar surface itself). B&W negative film can reliably capture around 10 stops of dynamic range (that is, about a 1000:1 range between highlights and shadow); pulling can extend that another stop or so. However you'd need
at least 16 stops to be able to capture the range between the sunlit lunar surface and the very brightest stars; I don't think you can pull enough to coax that kind of range out of B&W film, at least not with the emulsions that flew on Apollo.
Forget about color film (negative
or transparency). You could probably use HDR techniques with a digital system to capture that range, but that doesn't help when it comes to Apollo images.
(This is part of why the shadows on the lunar surface appear so stark in the Apollo images - yes, part of it is because there's no atmosphere to scatter light and create a diffuse light source, but it's also because the film can't handle the range from highlight to shadow, so shadow detail is lost).
As it is, if you are taking pictures on the moon and you expose for the sunlit lunar surface (using the Sunny 16 rule or something close to it), you will get a pitch-black sky (clear negative in that part of the frame). If you expose for the stars, the sunlit lunar surface will be a detail-free blob of pure white (maximally dense negative in that part of the frame). You can't expose for both in the same frame (at least, not without one
hell of a graded filter).
Now, if you're on the far side of the moon during lunar "night", then you should be able to capture both the lunar surface and the stars at the same time, since the stars will be the only source of illumination. And if someone ever launches a "night" mission to the far side one of these decades, that would be a cool picture to get (imagine the Milky Way rising over the lunar horizon without a hint of atmosphere to get in the way).
But I know for certain that in certain cases, details can be revealed using digital manipulation. Would you agree?
Yes, providing the details are there. if they were never there no amount of manipulation will reveal them.
CSI (and similar shows) have ruined the minds of a generation. Sure, I can zoom in on a
lone pixel and reveal a reflection of the killer's face in the window!
The stars didn't register on those shots. No amount of manipulation is going to bring them out.
To add to this, I've no idea how black space is outside of the Earth atmos. I've no idea how raw sunlight affects film. I've no idea how the original film captured details. I had NONE of this knowledge. It's now more available to me. You see i have a romantic Idea that space is dazzlingly luminous with uncountable stars. It's got nothing to do with my camera. It's an unknown to me to shoot in space. I was hoping for more stars.
Space is dazzingly luminous with uncountable stars, as many astronauts have reported. You just can't photograph them with a bright moon in shot. Don't mistake a black sky for dark.
To Icarus1: check out NASA TV for video from the ISS sometime; it will give you an idea of the lighting challenges.