Moon photography is relatively difficult with smartphone camera compared to DSLR. The main reason is the short focal length of most of the smartphone cameras that are mostly around 30mm effective focal length. I have tried to capture the details of the moon and the images below are probably the best I can get.
In the first image, it was very bright and I have to use very fast shutter speed to capture the surface details of the moon. As expected, everything except the moon was underexposed. For the second image, it was a crescent moon so I can use longer exposure time to properly expose the moon and clouds. For focusing, we can set focus distance to infinity but for OnePlus 3, it doesn’t appear sharp in infinity focus. I am not sure whether this is a software issue. What I did is I zoomed into the moon and used the focus slider to adjust for the sharpest moon, then I fixed the focus distance and zoomed out to adjust other settings.
Since smartphone camera is so limited in photographing the moon, it is recommended to shoot the moon with foreground to create more interesting moon images.
If you really want a clearer moon image, you can do it with $10-$20 detachable clip-on telescope lens for smartphone. I purchased a 8x zoom lens to take a better view of moon.
These are the images that I have captured.
The disadvantage of add-on lens is the images will be a little blurred, probably due to the lens quality and imperfect alignment with camera lens array. The difficultly that I noticed is the focusing, it took me awhile to adjust the focusing on both lens ring and camera slider to achieve the sharpest images.
Going further, I shoot 25 images for image stacking on RegistaX. RegistaX is a free software for planetary image stacking to create better detailed images. I stacked 25 images in RegistaX and adjusted the wavelets, final Lightroom adjustment gives me this result.
There are more details in this image compared to single exposure moon image.
Budget moon photography is doable on smartphone, with additional higher power zoom lens and post-processing on RegistaX, we are able to create detailed moon images on smartphone camera.