Hanging in the Balance

This is not a painting at all but a photograph of the Moon, captured by one of NASA's cameras. The image shows the Moon partly lit, with the terminator line cutting across the surface where day meets night. Along that boundary the craters throw long shadows, which is why the pockmarked terrain at the bottom looks so sharp and three dimensional. When the Sun hits the Moon head on, those same craters flatten out and nearly vanish, so this angled light is what gives the surface its rugged texture.

The dark patches near the center and top are the lunar maria, or seas, though there is no water in them. They are ancient plains of hardened lava that early astronomers mistook for oceans, which is how they got their watery names. The rest of the bright, heavily cratered ground is the lunar highlands, older and rougher, marked by billions of years of impacts with nothing to wear them away. Set against the pure black of space, the Moon here feels less like the familiar disc we see from a backyard and more like a real world, round and heavy and drifting on its own.