Exploring Craters From Ranger to Apollo

Abstract

Forgotten for almost 800 years, this narrative by a group of British monks captured the fancy of a geologist named Jack B. Hartung in 1976. He suspected that this report could be an accurate observation of a comet or an asteroid hitting the moon.² The chronicle describes an extraordinary event—the upper part of the crescent splitting in two as debris from the crash blasts a dark cloud hundreds of miles across the moon and finally a pall of dust giving the moon a shortlived atmosphere and preventing its light from reaching us— blackening it in a sense.

Now there was a bright new moon, and as usual in that phase its horns were tilted towards the east. Suddenly the upper horn split in two. From the midpoint of the division a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out, over a considerable distance, fire, hot coals, and sparks. Meanwhile the body of the moon which was below writhed, as it were, in anxiety, and to put it in the words of those who reported it to me and saw it with their own eyes, the moon throbbed like a wounded snake. Afterwards it resumed its proper state. The phenomenon was repeated a dozen times or more, the flame assuming various twisting shapes at random and then returning to normal. Then after these transformations the moon from horn to horn, that is along its whole length, took on a blackish appearance.¹