i tried taking pics of the 3/4 moon outside my place and i noticed the poor image quality even on the LCD which i confirmed on my computer. weird thing is, later images were of slightly better quality.
the only settings changed were from P to M mode and exposure settings.
first pic is an example of the bad pic
last 2 were the better ones but still bad to me...
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/tarui/moon_4009.png
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/tarui/moon_4018.png
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/tarui/moon_4019.png
A likely reason is the presence of high clouds which you cannot see with your naked eye. This happens all the time to astrophotography especially in SG where clouds prevail.
Since you used 70-300 on D70s, your images are probably cropped and your lens may not be sharp enough to resolve the moon surface also. The difference in quality you obtained with P mode and M mode may be due to the aperture in use also. Selecting f/8 or f/11 may give you a better image since most lenses are slightly better when stopped down a couple of stops.
For example, this moon below is shot with D2X using 300/4 and resized to show the entire frame and the relative size of the moon within the frame. It's quite small.
This is the crop. As you can see, even with more megapixels from the D2X, because the magnification due to the cropping is tremendous, the image is not really sharp because the lens was not able to resolve.
This is the entire frame resized shot with D2X through a 1250mm SCT telescope around the same time. It already has so much more detail than the 300/4 because the lens is designed to give this kind of magnification.
A crop from this image would yield something like this.. you can see that the focus is not spot on and there is some camera shake also. Again, this is pushing beyond the limits of the telescope.
The absence of clouds helps in both cases, shot within minutes of each other.
