Comments on: These clouds are nice. Some clouds are ice!

These clouds are nice. Some clouds are ice!

riotgrrl69 — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 12:45:08 -0800

۞۩unusual clouds۩۞

By: Hildegarde

Hildegarde — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 12:50:56 -0800

Neat pictures, but what's with the goofy characters?

By: riotgrrl69

riotgrrl69 — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 12:53:12 -0800

By: sfts2

sfts2 — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 12:55:04 -0800

Now I see the origins of many UFO stories. It was sort of cool seeing the cloud that looks very much like a very famous UFO pic.

By: Harry

Harry — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 12:55:44 -0800

Ok. That took me far too long.

By: gsteff

gsteff — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 12:57:21 -0800

Neato. No wonder earlier peoples thought some intelligent being must control the weather. Some of the bumpy thunderstorm ones near the bottom look color corrected though.

By: empath

empath — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 13:04:01 -0800

A friend of mine took some pictures of a wierd spiral cloud formation that I couldn't figure out what it was. any ideas?

By: blue_beetle

blue_beetle — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 13:05:38 -0800

Funnel cloud. Run.

By: empath

empath — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 13:07:03 -0800

You think? He took 3 more pictures, but it didn't seem to develop at all. -- anyway.. its a tangent

By: xod

xod — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 13:10:04 -0800

Welcome our Slyph Overlords!

By: redteam

redteam — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 13:12:56 -0800

empath, Gozer the Gozerian has arrived. Leave town!

By: unwordy

unwordy — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 13:13:19 -0800

If all of those pictures are real photographs, i'm amazed. Without scientific explanation, our ancestors must have been one confused, faithful lot.

By: TedW

TedW — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 13:16:15 -0800

Mmm-pancakes! Sorry, couldn't resist; this is actually a very cool post.

By: snofoam

snofoam — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 13:16:27 -0800

clouds taste metallic

By: black bile

black bile — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 13:17:02 -0800

So you're saying many UFOs hide in clouds over mountains?

By: sonofsamiam

sonofsamiam — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 13:22:02 -0800

empath: Uzumaki

By: chimaera

chimaera — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 13:28:48 -0800

empath: my guess is that's a visible exhaust/condensation cloud from a helicopter that was circling.

By: Steven C. Den Beste

Steven C. Den Beste — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 13:36:42 -0800

Remember the phrase "the voyages of discovery"? Actually, before the Europeans did it, there was another group which engaged in some epic voyages of discovery: the Polynesians, who found and colonized the Pacific islands using nothing more complicated than outrigger canoes to cross thousands of miles of ocean in search of a few specks of land they didn't necessarily even have any reason to believe existed at all. They were amazing mariners, and one of the reasons they were able to succeed is that they were very keen observers of nature. For instance, they knew they were near land when they started seeing gulls and other seabirds. And they sometimes detected the exact locations of islands from great distances by observing those kinds of lenticular clouds over them, even though the islands were beyond and under the horizon.

By: loquacious

loquacious — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 13:41:42 -0800

empath: Without a sense of scale, I'm going to have to second the argument that it's aircraft exhuast, probably a helicopter. The darkness/color, the puffs of turbulance in the structure all make it look like exhaust. But I'll be damned if I've ever seen anything leave an exhaust trail like that. WTF? Was it particularly cold/dry that day?

By: jal0021

jal0021 — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 13:53:34 -0800

Indeed, it looks like an exhaust trail. As tight a circle as it is, it'd almost have to be a helicopter. Or a UFO with AWD. Near the bottom of the page linked by the OP, you'll see two photos of a tornado in Kansas. I witnessed this tornado as well. My view... One of the prettiest tornadoes I've ever seen.

By: Smedleyman

Smedleyman — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 13:54:26 -0800

Those ones from New Zealand look like Cthulu. esp.Mike Burch / Taken at sunset in Paremata, New Zealand

By: Hildegarde

Hildegarde — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 13:54:47 -0800

Great shot!

By: MNDZ

MNDZ — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 13:54:59 -0800

so damn cool !

By: Sk4n

Sk4n — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 13:55:23 -0800

That's no cloud....

By: Bort

Bort — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 14:11:54 -0800

Very cool. Thanks.

By: katillathehun

katillathehun — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 14:26:25 -0800

We see clouds like that often out here in the northern part of Los Angeles. Lenticular clouds, mountains, sunset, filthy smog... it all paints a beautiful canvas.

By: Mitheral

Mitheral — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 14:37:25 -0800

Hildegarde writes "but what's with the goofy characters?" She wanted to get that annoying tick into the comment box? empath writes "A friend of mine took some pictures of a wierd spiral cloud formation that I couldn't figure out what it was." Could have been a seeding plane. We can sometimes see trails from the seeding plane doing hail suppression. Usually the track is back and forth rather than circular though.

By: Astro Zombie

Astro Zombie — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 14:38:29 -0800

Every single on of those pictures were clouds trying to form a Goatse in the skies.

By: CynicalKnight

CynicalKnight — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 14:45:10 -0800

Q: Neat pictures, but what's with the goofy characters? A:np That's the best riposte I've seen in a long time. Zing!

By: Vindaloo

Vindaloo — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 14:49:18 -0800

ah darn, the site's section on UFO pics is password protected...

By: pax digita

pax digita — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 15:15:58 -0800

Unless that seeding plane was way the hell high up, that's a really tight orbit, and it's surprisingly precise without any nearby visual reference points. I guess a small plane could do it if the pilot really watched his altitude and there wasn't much wind, though.

By: booksandlibretti

booksandlibretti — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 15:43:01 -0800

I think the spiral is probably a helicopter's contrail. I'd guess it was probably a TV/radio helicopter (common) and it was circling something interesting (traffic accident, crime in progress, etc.). The site itself -- well, we get all these cool cloud pictures that imply "This is probably the UFO you've been looking for," and then maybe 20% of the way in, we get this:

However for many these are not natural formations, but something not of this world, from higher dimensions rather...In the Bible there is much written about cloudships. The Bible is referring to some type of flying craft that possess an ability to hover in one place for a longer time and appears in the sky surrounded with clouds.Ancient texts describe how pilots could using correct proportions of certain chemicals give their flying machine "the appearence of a cloud"

Wha?

By: riotgrrl69

riotgrrl69 — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 15:51:55 -0800

yes, this site is mammalian guano!

By: skilletfish

skilletfish — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 16:18:30 -0800

Way cool. The wave clouds are so strange.

By: delmoi

delmoi — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 16:39:57 -0800

brooks: I think some of those are captions from the original photographer or something.

By: booksandlibretti

booksandlibretti — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 17:53:01 -0800

Yeah, but in other cases, it seemed like photographers' captions were italicized and had names appended. That quote is just from the section header on lenticular clouds.

By: flapjax at midnite

flapjax at midnite — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 18:57:43 -0800

These photos are just too beautiful. Thanks riotgrrrrrrrrrl!

By: hattifattener

hattifattener — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 21:31:02 -0800

SCDB: They did amazing things with wave patterns, too. The book Mathematics Elsewhere talks about this a bit (and mostly about how they made maps).

By: BlackLeotardFront

BlackLeotardFront — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 21:34:44 -0800

They went on forever, they - when I - we lived in Arizona and the skies always had little fluffy clouds in em and they were long and clear and there were lots of stars at night. And uh when it would rain they would all turn, they were beautiful, the most beautiful skies as a matter of fact. The sunsets were purple and red and yellow and on fire. (The Orb's "Little Fluffy Clouds") Good post!

By: emjaybee

emjaybee — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 22:21:03 -0800

I guess we don't get lenticular clouds much in my part of Texas...I've never seen any, and I've always loved cloudwatching. We get lots of cirrus clouds, fish-scale clouds before a storm, and some amazing thunderheads drifting across the sky and making everything beneath them seem incredibly small. I still remember my whole math class in HS pausing to watch a magnificent cloudfront sweep across the sky outside our windows...and how the temps dropped immediately, bringing in a blue norther. Weather rocks.

By: paulsc

paulsc — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 00:30:10 -0800

Cool post, riotgrrl69. Thx!

By: Phantomx

Phantomx — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 03:40:42 -0800

Lenticular clouds need a mountainside or a large hill to force a large amount of air up into other, colder layers of air. That's why there are so many pictures of them formed over mountains. That's one of the types of clouds I'll accept not seeing here in Indiana. Must see it sometime when I'm out in Colorado or something. I still want to see wave clouds. They look so fake, like the grade school waves in a play (as far as television tells me).

By: revmitcz

revmitcz — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 04:09:15 -0800

I had two thoughts when I saw this. 1. When I was a wee lad, my teacher said Van Gogh suffered from paranoid delusions, which explained his 'Starry Night' painting cause no one sees stuff like that in the sky (her words. not verbatim) and I see that she was clearly wrong about that. 2. I think I need to get out more often. In my almost 30 years on this planet, I ain't never seen no shit like that. Nifty.

By: moonshine

moonshine — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 09:55:32 -0800

Clouds make me happy. Thanks. The exception being angry clouds