Clouds

March 8, 2005 3:08 PM

"We pledge to fight ‘blue-sky thinking’ wheresoever we find it!"
Clouds can be strange looking, majestic, colourful, freaky, ominous or electric to name but a few.
Perhaps you’d like to go cloud ’surfing’ in a glider along a 600 mile cloud formation that appears in Queensland (film links/explanation) later in the year?
Or would you rather view your clouds from satellite?
You can otherwise study cloud formations at your leisure if you want.

There’s a million more sites around of course – first link via.
posted by peacay (14 comments total)

Hey, I love clouds too, but this one looks like nothing but jet trails to me. (Clouds, yes, but man-produced).

My kind of clouds are those found at Extreme Instability. You know what they say: "Convection Happens".
posted by spock at 3:18 PM on March 8, 2005

How you'd love to live up there - kiss the sky and walk on air. If there was no gravity, you'd be in nephology.
posted by aubilenon at 3:27 PM on March 8, 2005

There used to be a site...I think it may have been called kloudscapes.com...where you could view and download 1600x1200 beautiful cloud images for desktop eye-candy. I really miss that site sometimes.
posted by alumshubby at 3:38 PM on March 8, 2005

Each year they come to this sleepy town in the hope of ‘soaring’ the Morning Glory, an exhilarating gliding adventure that can only be described as cloud-surfing. from the 'surfing' link

I need to do this. Thanks a lot for that link -- it's fascinating.
posted by rooftop secrets at 3:54 PM on March 8, 2005

spock.........I'm pretty sure they are real, NOT man-made. There's no info. onsite about it and I admit it is my hunch....presumably the site hosts, who are cloudophilics would have weeded out jet aircraft aberrations ... I've seen similar formations, admittedly not quite so many streams at once though but I s'pose that's why the pic got posted and hosted - uniqueness.
posted by peacay at 3:57 PM on March 8, 2005

Here's a movie [mpeg] showing the author of the article flying along the face of the Morning Glory Cloud.
posted by rooftop secrets at 4:04 PM on March 8, 2005

Saw this on MoFi the other day and it immediately called this post to mind.

Strong work, peacay!
posted by TedW at 4:15 PM on March 8, 2005

Also often worth browsing: 'clouds' on Flickr. At times a little monotonous, but then you'll get the occasional gem.

That Morning Glory cloud, though...just jaw-droppingly incredible. Thanks!
posted by djwudi at 4:31 PM on March 8, 2005

Jet tails, nothing -- them's chemtrails! Yes, the first picture is of contrails. Contrails make as good cloud photos as anything, though. I was surprised to find no mammatus or lenticular clouds, which have always been tops on the strangeness list for me.
posted by mendel at 5:01 PM on March 8, 2005

The morning glory cloud surfing story is very interesting. Waves in the atmosphere makes me daydream of bird migration routes and the badass Aleut kayaker Raven from Snow Crash surfing a wave across the Pacific. Also, I find mammatus clouds fun and attractive.
posted by roboto at 6:11 PM on March 8, 2005

that Morning Glory thing is amazing! I'd love to sail that, too (frankly, I'd love to hanglide period).
posted by evening at 6:14 PM on March 8, 2005

mendel - those clouds are amazing! thanks for the pictures.
posted by evening at 6:21 PM on March 8, 2005

Thank you mendel for those pictures. Mindblowing.
posted by rooftop secrets at 10:57 PM on March 8, 2005

mendel: ditto ! Amazing. Fanx.
posted by peacay at 3:58 AM on March 9, 2005