Whenever I write the name of the Sea of Crises, or Mare Crisium, I wonder what crises it could be refering to. Some vast hurricane perhaps?

These days I’m afraid nothing ever seems to happen there, except the sun rising and setting once a month, and the relentless inching away of the Earth. Anyway, this most alluring of targets on the moon is visible with the naked eye as a circular dark spot towards the mid-right hand edge. It’s a circular impact basin flooded with basalt, with very interesting details. I drew it at speed through a wobbly atmosphere under very cold conditions. It was a full moon so I had to use a dark filter to preserve my eyes.

Features of interest include the huge peninsular Promontorium Agarum, 12 miles long, a relic of the fractured crust that the impact wraught.  The whole of the bottom part of the picture reflects this fractured rim. Towards the top of the picture is the bright white crater Proclus, complete with dark melt ring, whose rays splattered across the near-side of the basin. The basalt flooding the basin overflowed the lip to produce Mare Anguis. Several large-ish craters have marked the basalt floor of the basin; Picard, Peirce and Swift. Yerkes is a flooded ghost crater, whose rim is more visible under a low sun.