The moon orbits the earth in a nearly circular pattern every 27.3 days. The moon's orbit is tilted approximately 5 degrees off of the path of the plane of the ecliptic (or the path that the sun appears to trace across the sky), and orbits at a distance of almost 240,000 miles from the earth.

In fact, the moon orbits the earth in an ellipse. In fact, any two objects of any mass orbit each other in an ellipse. It turns out that these ellipses are almost circles - but not quite (especially the orbit of Pluto which is so elliptical that some times it is closer to the sun than Neptune). There's a good reason why all these orbits are so circular: it has to do with how the solar system was formed in the first place.

The moon travels an almost circular orbit around the earth at a mean distance of 384,400 kilometers. The moon rotates around the earth in the same direction that the earth rotates around the sun. In addition, the earth rotates about its axis in the same direction as well!

The moon moves around the earth in an almost perfectly circular path. The orbit of the moon is inclined about 5 degrees retaliative to the ecliptic, which is the plane defined by the orbit of the earth about the sun.