By Paul A. Harris

This small basaltic pebble (8cm x 5cm) with a round remnant of a quartz vein features a particularly realistic image of a full moon, complete with craters. The white-flecked texture lets one imagine the full moon floating in star-filled sky. 

The moon in a stone evokes two ideas. First, just as viewing stones are often small scale versions of mountains or landscapes, every rock can be seen as a 'chip off the old block,' a piece of Earth that serves as a miniature model of the planet. Secondly, the moon in a stony fragment of Earth reminds us that the moon was once part of the Earth, ostensibly being separated in its early history in an impact collision with a Mars-size body cosmologists call Theia.

I have fond memories of finding this stone one beautiful morning on the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska, with views across Cook Inlet to volcanic mountains in the Aleutian Range. Displaying it on a piece of driftwood seemed fitting, since the stone and wood are natural materials that are smoothed by waves and washed up on the beach by tides.