Comments on: in the clouds

in the clouds

nickyskye — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 10:09:17 -0800

Rare and strange cloud formations. Mammatus, lenticular, noctilucent, nacreous, hole in the sky. Basic cloud guide.

By: robocop is bleeding

robocop is bleeding — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 10:12:52 -0800

Don't forget chemtrails! They're like clouds, but flavored with sweet, sweet crazy.

By: jbickers

jbickers — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 10:14:21 -0800

Wow, some beautiful stuff here. Those b/w ones about a third of the way down the first post are stunning.

By: gsteff

gsteff — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 10:17:11 -0800

This is sort of a double.

By: buriednexttoyou

buriednexttoyou — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 10:18:33 -0800

Clouds Taste Metallic

By: cubby

cubby — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 10:19:46 -0800

glad to learn about those lenticular clouds -- I saw something once that I could not explain, and now I have an idea about what it likely was.

By: Burhanistan

Burhanistan — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 10:24:50 -0800

Cloud pictures are interesting. That said, there was a guy once who was a semi-professional photographer. He took probably thousands of pictures of cloud formations he found interesting. One day, he had a kind of realization that most all clouds were interesting and there was little point in his trying to obsessively capture them. After that day he never took pictures of cloud formations again. I like the post, by the way.

By: simonemarie

simonemarie — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 10:29:52 -0800

nice post!

By: nebulawindphone

nebulawindphone — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 10:40:45 -0800

Quick! Someone alert the Pixies! Ah well. At least the ground's still cold. Another monkey rapture averted.

By: LionIndex

LionIndex — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 10:44:46 -0800

By: Burhanistan

Burhanistan — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 10:53:00 -0800

Stieglitz? "Equivalents"? Those are nice, but no. This guy was a random Texan who is probably still alive.

By: mckenney

mckenney — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 11:01:17 -0800

That Atmospheric Optics site is absolutely the best of the web. I have spent hours fucking around on there, and actually used it to my advantage when, while drunk on a Thursday night, a busboy at the bar I was drinking at asked me what that weird ring around the moon was. I was all "It'sh an ishe halo, dude." Booyah.

By: MarshallPoe

MarshallPoe — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 11:14:26 -0800

Very cool. I live in the Midwest, where you see a lot of weird cloud formations. Sometimes I just look up in the sky, see some wacked out cloud formation, and say "holy shit!" There's a lot of "holy shit" in this post.

By: French Fry

French Fry — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 11:20:40 -0800

Holy shit

By: jourman2

jourman2 — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 11:24:50 -0800

er...does no one else that thinks a lot of these may be photoshopped? You're telling me there's really a sky full of butts floating around there somewhere.

By: stenseng

stenseng — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 11:27:47 -0800

Nature doesn't need photoshop, dude.

By: Dave Faris

Dave Faris — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 11:31:07 -0800

It's really no wonder that less evolved thinkers would think that someone upstairs was trying to tell us something.

By: poppo

poppo — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 11:31:42 -0800

Mammatus, from the latin, for boobs. Appropriately named. Interesting that jourman sees butts instead though :)

By: nickyskye

nickyskye — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 11:34:47 -0800

mckenney, that's exactly how I feel about the Atmospheric Optics site (of the nacreous link in the post). Though I haven't been blotto while naming the unusual cloud formations, ;-), it's fun to know/share obscure meteorology data wherever one may be. Neat the busboy now knows about an ice halo. Always liked the term sun dog but moon bow, glory, Brocken Spectre, heiligenschein and supernumerary are juicy sky event names. MarshallPoe, have added holyshit as a tag. It's rightfully an important meteorological descriptor.

By: spock

spock — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 11:35:11 -0800

er...does no one else that thinks a lot of these may be photoshopped? You're telling me there's really a sky full of butts floating around there somewhere. Sky full of breasts is more like it (thus the name mammatus, if you had read the links). And yes, I can assure you they do exist (on the undersides of the anvils of supercells) and they are an indicator of an extremely unstable atmosphere. Another day with such clouds: here and here (Same day and place).

By: Atom Eyes

Atom Eyes — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 11:39:12 -0800

Nature doesn't need photoshop, dude. Nature, shmature. God uses Mario Paint.

By: phaedon

phaedon — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 11:41:53 -0800

Rare and strange cloud formations. Don't forget chemtrails! MAN, YOU PEOPLE ARE DENSE!

By: phaedon

phaedon — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 11:47:34 -0800

*runs downstairs, turns oven on*

By: Dave Faris

Dave Faris — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 11:49:12 -0800

here you go.

By: Dizzy

Dizzy — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 11:49:24 -0800

Beautiful post! Thanks!

By: moss

moss — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 11:49:27 -0800

One afternoon when I was in high school there was a big formation of either nacreous or iridescent clouds (I'm not sure which). It was amazing. I don't know if they're more common elsewhere, but you practically never see something like that around here. Everyone just sort of stood and watched them for a good fifteen minutes or so, trying to figure out what was going on.

By: Thorzdad

Thorzdad — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 11:53:12 -0800

Let's not forget the Mighty Clouds of Joy!

By: evilangela

evilangela — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 12:04:50 -0800

I've seen a formation of mammatus clouds once, when living in the Chicago suburbs. I remember looking outside, noticing the clouds were strange, and going out onto the apartment balcony. They weren't quite as strong as in these pictures, but it was a strange, wavy pattern - almost like a smoothed out eggshell matress. It was the strangest cloud formation I've ever seen, and I can still picture them, and recall the eerie, surreal feeling I got when looking up at the sky and seeing it.

By: brundlefly

brundlefly — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 12:23:38 -0800

The mammatus clouds look exactly like something from a special effects cloud tank in the 80s, like in Ghostbusters. Here I was thinking that those shots looked fake!

By: allelopath

allelopath — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 13:21:45 -0800

Cloud Appreciation Society http://www.cloudappreciationsociety.org/

By: Foosnark

Foosnark — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 14:30:05 -0800

There's a hole in the... sky Through which things can... fly.

By: pril

pril — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 15:33:11 -0800

I have seen mammatus clouds (or something very much like them) in Nebraska (apparently others have too). They were striking enough that I got out the camera.

By: Ethereal Bligh

Ethereal Bligh — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 17:01:29 -0800

This one (the fourteenth on the first linked page) is a photo of some nightmarish end-of-the-world event where we're all sucked from the Earth by hagfish-like aliens from a nearby galaxy.

By: Skygazer

Skygazer — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 17:16:35 -0800

These clouds rock!

By: nickyskye

nickyskye — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 17:34:28 -0800

Love the additional links and photos. Thank you. The photographer, Jorn Olsen, who took the amazing pic of the mammatus in Hastings, Nebraska apparently has a lovely slideshow of images, dedicated to mammatus clouds. My real faves are the ominous, dramatic images, like this one.

By: Ethereal Bligh

Ethereal Bligh — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 17:38:56 -0800

Yeah, that one is terrifying. Having grown up in tornado country and many times cowered in closets in fear of one nearby, that photo is something out of my nightmares. In these dreams, I typically look out a window or otherwise spot a tornado—and after a minute or so, realize that it's coming this way. Then I look in another direction, and there's another one. Thankfully, since the Cold War ended, I no longer have nightmares about looking out the window and seeing a mushroom cloud. I do, however, have similar dreams about seeing planes fall out of the sky.

By: nickyskye

nickyskye — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 18:59:39 -0800

aw, EB, sorry you used to have storm nightmares. I love storms, love the weather in general, all kinds. But nightmares aren't fun. Wishing you sweet dreams. :)

By: Ethereal Bligh

Ethereal Bligh — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 19:12:49 -0800

Oh, I love storms, too. Where I grew up there were frequent dramatic thunderstorms in the spring and summer. I love thunderstorms. I like seeing the lightning flash and hearing the thunder shake the windows and house. I especially love hearing the roar of a real downpour on the roof. There weren't many dramatic storms like that during the eight years I lived in Austin. Albuquerque doesn't have as many as where I grew up, but it does have a lot more than Austin. I've enjoyed the weather here. And it's about that time of year, although I've read that it's supposed to be dry here this season. I know a lot of people who've seen one or more tornadoes. The few times I've been very close to one, I've been hidden in a safer place where I can't see anything. The worst was in a big shopping mall with the tornado across the street. The psychological environment of these dreams of tornadoes and mushroom clouds is that I see these things first, feel this fear of impending doom, and then I invariably try to alert the people around me to the danger and suggest a means to escape. Pretty easy to tease the meaning out of that. :) But it's also, no doubt, partly about nothing more than that fear of seeing some terrifying threat to one's life that is unpredictable and imminent. It's interesting how primal, I think, is our sense of violence in storm clouds. Maybe it's learned, though—I don't know. But it's a big violence and I think that when we read what seems to us as quaint descriptions of Zeus throwing thunderbolts we're not really connecting to the sense of awesome, huge, and terrible violence in that conception.

By: po

po — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 22:55:02 -0800

Whoa. That one looks like Aunt Maggie's butt! Awesome post. Thank you.

By: flapjax at midnite

flapjax at midnite — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 04:51:16 -0800

Wow, noctilucent... Who knew? Fabulous world we live in!

By: moonbird

moonbird — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 05:58:42 -0800

Saw this one two days ago. I'm at a complete loss to explain it.

By: flapjax at midnite

flapjax at midnite — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 06:26:41 -0800

Maybe a guy on a skywriting job who got halfway through the letter 'O' before his partner radioed up to the plane to tell him the client hadn't paid up?

By: nickyskye

nickyskye — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 09:10:14 -0800

moonbird, to the best of my knowledge is a parhelion, sundog. (funny to write that when your username is moonbird :) There was an image in the NOAA photobank of this phenomenon in Asheville, taken in 1971 but the NOAA photo site is misbehaving, so here's a google cache image, the first one. Here's info on the physics of a sundog.

By: moonbird

moonbird — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 10:47:34 -0800

Nicky, I'm pretty familiar with sundogs, and this was a free-floating cloud (watched it roll with the wind). It was pretty clearly low altitude. It looked like half a smoke ring billowing.

By: nickyskye

nickyskye — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 11:37:14 -0800

oh wow, so it wasn't a sundog. Guess it may belong to the Wtf Inexplicabla Weirdus type then.

By: nicolin

nicolin — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 02:49:39 -0800

beautiful thanks