What are the differences between LDAP and Active Directory?

Active Directory is a database based system that provides authentication, directory, policy, and other services in a Windows environment

LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is an application protocol for querying and modifying items in directory service providers like Active Directory, which supports a form of LDAP.

Short answer: AD is a directory services database, and LDAP is one of the protocols you can use to talk to it.

LDAP is a standard, AD is Microsoft's (proprietary) implementation (and more). Wikipedia has a good article that delves into the specifics. I found this document with a very detailed evaluation of AD from an LDAP perspective.

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol or LDAP, is a standards based specification for interacting with directory data. Directory Services can implement support of LDAP to provide interoperability among 3rd party applications.

Active Directory is Microsoft's implementation of a directory service that, among other protocols, supports LDAP to query it's data.

While it supports LDAP, Active Directory provides a host of extensions and conveniences, such as password expiration and account lockout.

There are lots of systems that support LDAP to talk to them, not just Active Directory.

Sun, IBM, Novell all have directory services that are very effective as LDAP servers.