The crescent Moon as seen through Earth’s thin upper atmosphere

The atmosphere is the medium of climate. It insulates Earth and keeps it warm, transports heat from the tropics to the poles and from the surface to the heights, and transfers water from the oceans to land by precipitation. A crew member of the International Space Station took this photograph of a crescent Moon from about 360 kilometers (225 miles) above Earth. The cloud deck is about 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) high. (Image Science and Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center, http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/, photograph ISS008-E-8951)