Just take two pictures with high and low exposure and have them merge in photoshop or some photo editing software to blend them up to your liking. That's how long exposure pics of stars are taken and the landscape (ex: lit from the moon) is still less illuminated than the sky.
I've been a photographer for many years, I know all about HDR, I use it a lot for landscapes now instead of GND filters like the good old days. Lots of people go overkill with the HDR though creating unnatural colors and that drives me nuts. Problem with an lunar eclipse is is moves pretty quick, and you need longish (20s) exposures for the dark side, it might have been possible still, I don't know. I could have tried an HDR merge from a single split RAW file. But honestly I don't care about that image that much, I was just messing around.
And I agree. the different shades of light on the moon made getting good pictures insanely hard!!
Yeah, you cannot trust your meter for moon shots, unless you have a hand held with a really small spot. The blackness around the moon will fool 99% of all built in meters
However, since the Moon is just reflected sunlight, I've always found that the "sunny 16" rule (f-16 aperture, shutter speed set same as ISO) works out just fine for standard moon shots. I'm to lazy to go through the metadata, but I'm pretty sure I shot that first one at f16, 1/400 and ISO 400.
