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A small crater in the northern reaches of Oceanus Procellarum, near the meeting of that lunar ocean with Mare Imbrium, the Sea of Rains. Bessarion is 10.2 kilometres from side to side and 2 km deep, and is accompanied by a scattering of smaller satellite craters. One of these, Bessarion E, lies close to Bessarion directly to the north, and at 8 km in diameter is only marginally smaller than Bessarion itself.
Bessarion and its smaller companions lie in a wide and largely featureless plain in the northwestern quadrant of the Moon's nearside. The nearest significant feature is Kepler, a crater some three times the diameter of Bessarion, which lies almost directly to the south at a distance of a little more than 200 km.
The crater Bessarion takes its name from Basilios Bessarion (whose name is sometimes recorded as Johannes Bessarion), a Greek scholar and cardinal who lived during the fifteenth century.
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