Makes me wonder, have we ever observed a large strike on the moon? It seems that given the history of the Earth, we should have observed a sizeable strike on the moon sometime in the last 2500 years.
When writing about the events of the the year 1178 in his Chronicle, Gervase of Canterbury interrupts his account of kings and wars to relate a very unusual occurrence in the night sky:
This year on the 18th of June, when the Moon, a slim crescent, first became visible, a marvellous phenomenon was seen by several men who were watching it. Suddenly, the upper horn of the crescent was split in two. From the mid point of the division, a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out over a considerable distance fire, hot coals and sparks. The body of the Moon which was below, writhed like a wounded snake. This happened a dozen times or more, and when the Moon returned to normal, the whole crescent took on a blackish appearance.
This account has puzzled modern astronomers – some suggest that the monks saw an asteroid crashing into the moon, while others believe that it was a meteorite that had entered the Earth’s atmosphere at just the right spot – between the monks and the moon – making the observers believe that what they saw was happening on the moon.
There were some monks in a monastery who left a written record of a fairly large strike on the moon’s surface. Medieval period. Description was quite striking, peculiar. I recall their writing that the moon visibly wobbled, large plume ejected from the surface.