Moon, seen from the International Space Station (ISS) on 22 April 2003. The diameter of the Moon is 3476 kilometres. It orbits the Earth at a distance of around 385,000 kilometres. It is seen here through the Earth's atmosphere with clouds (white) and the blue colour of the sky fading into dark blue as the atmosphere thins into the vacuum of space. The Moon does not have an atmosphere and is a heavily cratered and barren piece of rock. The Moon's dark areas (maria) are craters filled by ancient lava flows. The ISS orbits around 380 kilometres above the Earth, about one-thousandth of the Earth-Moon distance. An ISS orbit takes 90 minutes. The Moon's orbit takes nearly 30 days.