I have an old Powershot SX50 HS. Only 50x zoom, so it won’t work nearly as well, but I should give it a try. 
Never thought of using it on the moon; mostly I use it to zoom in on birds and stuff.
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That’s… through the stock lens?! By itself?! And it’s got a 65x OPTICAL?! The more I sit here and stare at that photo the more I think… I may have found my new camera.
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Yes, that camera is 100% stock with 65x optical zoom. It does have its drawbacks such as a minimum shutter speed of 15 seconds. I was looking for something easy to carry while hiking, biking, snowshoeing, etc. that had the range to photograph wide vistas, macro photos, and wildlife. I’m not going to sell my photos to National Geographic so I don’t need the absolute best image quality. I have sold 16" x 20" prints of some of my photos with a previous generation of this camera.
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I don’t really know cameras, so may be reading this wrong…
Did you just say you have to keep the camera stationary and in focus for 15 full seconds to get a single picture?
If so… please say that is only at maximum zoom, and it can do normal photos at normal speeds.
Sorry. I must not have phrased that as well as I could have. The camera is actually reasonably fast at focusing and processing a photo (considering it’s cost).
What I tried to say is I can set the camera so the shutter stays open for anywhere from a tiny fraction of a second up to 15 seconds to allow light in for a shorter or longer period of time. With that limitation, it is difficult to photograph a stary night sky where you might want the shutter open for 30 seconds, 60 seconds, or more.
The camera also allows me to set the ISO value from 100 to 3200 to adjust how sensitive it is to the light it receives. But I only have that control on shutter speeds up to 1 second. For longer shutter speeds, it will only shoot at ISO 100.
For 95% of the photography I do, those settings work well. They become a problem when shooting the night sky. I can either shoot with a 1 second shutter speed and a high ISO value or I can shoot for 15 seconds at ISO 100. Neither of those options capture all the stars I see with my naked eye.
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Have you tried stacking the images? Pretty effective for astrophotography, especially if you have a good solid mount.
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I had not thought about that. Thanks for the suggestion! I’ll read up on it and give it a try. I have a pretty good tripod but one of the other small number of things I don’t like about this camera is there is no option for remote trigger. The best I can do is a 2 second or 10 second self timer to give the camera time to settle down after I press the shutter release.
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Used Canons make really interesting dedicated astro-cameras. There are DIY hacks to remove the IR rejection filter and thus make it far more sensitive. You can also flash open-source software that allows you to automagically take X number of images, every Y seconds/minutes/days.
Also – a remote shutter release would allow you to take images w/o jutter. Some of them will even hold your shutter open for extended shots (but you have to watch the battery life in the remote). http://r.ebay.com/roQ1Dh
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I thought for sure I had looked around for a remote shutter. Must have been for my previous camera. Thanks again!
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You may also want to,if possible, lock your mirror up, this will give you less shudder as well.