No, this is not a tutorial, and yes, the question mark in there on purpose.

This wonderful midnight scenery unfolded itself just as I was going to the sauna, and you know how I am, I had to abandon all else and go get my camera. Well, the scenery here is not as gorgeous as I saw it in real life. It is so hard to photograph the moon, together with the darker ground. I think it would be rather easy if I were to just zoom in on the moon itself, and only have to get that exposure right.

I can obviously do a little tweaking on RAW conversion, bring out some of the detail from the dark areas, but the quality sucks when I try to do it. It's obviously very underexposed. I can also overexpose the image, but then the same things happens on reverse. I also noticed that when I use a longer shutter speed, the starts are too fast and show movement, even in few seconds. It always surprises me how bright the moon actually is when you try to photograph it.

I shot this with the Nikon D7200 and the Sigma 18-35mm f/1.8 @ 31mm, ISO 250, f/2 and 0,5sec. I also tried with higher iso and a bigger f stop, okay, I tried like a lot of different combos, but nothing satisfied me like it should have.

So many possibilities and so many problems!

Is blending together multiple exposures the only way to make a situation like this work?

Pros, give me some tips!

_{Ps. I should really go to sleep and stop gazing at the moon...}