Moon pic - enhance attempt - question ?

[Nacoya]

Hi,

I took a pic of the moon last night at 2am from through our upstairs window. Camera - oly 3020z 3.2megap.
The original image (cropped only) is the first pic - it was set at point and shoot night mode.
I have modified the image to try and enhance/remove the very noisy and poor quality image.
First mod is fixing the colours using the curves and the eye droppers on the rgb channel. I used a threshold layer to get the dark and light areas. I then lightened it a bit and then removed the noise using the 'remove noise' tool in CS2.
Second mod is similar but i used the curves for each channel individually r,g,b using the eyedropper fix and got a completely different colour change. Then i fixed the noise the best i could.
First question - why are the modified images so different in colour between using the rgb channel curve as compare to using the individual curves as in the second mod.
Next question - which mod do you prefer and why. (if any of course)
Third question - what would you do differently and please have a go.

Just as an aside, my mate also took a pic(although he is in Torbay and i'm in central Scotland). But his camera is a D70 - just for fun i looked at his curves for improvement. Hardly a thing changed..shows the difference a quality dslr can make (that and the fact he is a semi-pro photographer i suppose ).

cheers,

nacoya