My iPhone 6 camera sucks

Tonight there's a beautiful orange full moon and I have a love for photography. I can't find our professional camera so I'm stuck with my iPhone 6. When the back-facing camera focuses, it just shows a ball of light. It could be from a street lamp for all I know. Which model iPhone or just phone takes the highest quality photos? Because I know for a fact mine doesn't!

Wash it.

You are facing some problems associated with mobile phones.

* it has to guess at the exposure, so things like the sun or moon will be tiny and overexposed
* a mobile has a wide angle lens, so the moon will be tiny in the shot
* when you view your photos on the mobiles tiny LCD, it may look like a high-quality image, but once you enlarge it and view it on your computers monitors, ALL the flaws and poor resolution will be exaggerated
* the colour of the "orange" full moon will be changed when the mobile attempts to autocorrect the white balance

Since "professional" cameras cost from $3,000 to $6,500 without a lens, they are rarely "misplaced" My guess is that you call ANY fully adjustable camera, "professional".

When you do find it, you will need to use the longest focal length lens in order to make the moon large enough in the frame to see much detail. Make sure that the white balance on the camera is set to full sun.
Make a first test exposure you make is the same as it would be if you were taking photos in during the day (1/ISO setting or your camera at f/16. Due to the density of the earth's atmosphere, you will then need to open the lenses aperture about two stops or lengthening the shutter speed

The link below shows the full moon shot with a 500 mm lens with 2x teleconverter. This combination made a focal length of 1,000 mm. Add the crop factor of 1.5x, the effective field of view is that of a 1,500 mm lens

The reason smartphone cameras degrade in quality is lack of lens protection. Clean the lens and be sure there are no scratches on it.

All smartphone cameras are easily purchased off of eBay for $8-$15. They're very cheap and technologically weak devices. No smartphone camera can take photos in low light, let alone night time. Plus the wide-angle lens in smartphones is totally what you would not want to use. To take a shot of the Moon or a solar eclipse, you have to use a very strong telephoto lens of at least 300-400mm (equivalent to 35mm format). The lenses that are in smartphones have a focal length of about 28mm (equivalent to 35mm format). So even if the camera did have all of the necessary exposure control that you need, and all of focusing control that you need, you'd still end up with a useless shot of the black, night sky with a small dot.

If you want to get into photography, then you have to use a camera with adjustments of the focusing and exposure. You refer to these as "professional" cameras, but that is a misnomer. The pros use the high-end DSLR, mirrorless cameras. There are plenty of entry-level cameras of the same design, just without the capabilities that a pro would need. These are fully capable of handling taking photos of the Moon. You just need to get a very strong telephoto lens. Down side is that because the sensor in these cameras are so big *(which is why their image quality is so good), the lenses have to be bigger with longer focal lengths.

You could go with a bridge camera like the Nikon P900. This is a camera that certainly looks like a DSLR, but it's really just a point-and-shoot camera. The sensor inside the P900 is much, much smaller than what's in mirrorless or DSLRs. This allows the camera designer to build a lens with a huge zoom range while keeping the overall physical dimensions very, very small. Downside is that the sensor is super small with super small pixels. Smaller the pixel, the lower the lower the dynamic range and the more noise you'll get. But, for $300-$700, you can get a lens with a huge zoom range. Most of these bridge cameras have telephoto lenses that zoom out to 1,200mm. That's a lot of lens that can literally fit in the palm of your hand. While this may sound great, most people who buy these types of cameras for Moon photos, will take a few shots of the Moon and that's it. I means how many photos of the Moon can one take before it gets to be a very boring subject? This means that owners of these cameras buy them for the zoom range, but never use the zoom range. They're sacrificing image quality for a zoom range that they will only use a few times.

So, the best thing to do is actually not buy anything, but instead rent. For several hundred dollars you can rent a high-end DSLR and a strong telephoto lens that would normally set you back $10,000.

You have fallen for the iPhone marketing hype. You know, the one where it is alleged that the quality of its photos challenges that of a large-sensor camera. It's true -- in all-around sufficient light, when viewed on nothing larger than a computer monitor, and taken of a subject that is suitable for a wide angle lens by a photographer who knows a little about the limitations of a tiny sensor. Maybe 75% of the shooting situations for iPhone users fit this scenario -- which is mainly snapshot shooting. The moon at night, sadly for you, does not. You'll have to find your other camera.

It is not a camera, it is a phone!