Photographing the moon at night

The camera has not problem photographing the moon in a bright day in Auto mode. At night, the camera might just record a featureles glare of disk. Here is a photo of the moon just shot today at 7:50pm December 27, 2012. Instead of the flat glowing disk I usually get, I get the "man on the moon" in P or Programmed mode using the EV setting of -1.5! That's right! -1.5 with a negative sign. That is counterintuitive, but it works!

Here is a cropped image of the moon photo above. Here we see the familiar features!

The information displayed for this image says

ISo	320
F. No.	4.5
Shutter	1/90
Flass	OFF
Photo size	4320x3240

That is not my best photo of the moon at night. Here is one with an EV value of -2.0!, and taken on the night of December 24, 2012.

Photo information: ISO 80, speed 1/250, f5.1 december 24, 2012.