(Click image to enlarge) Photographed on a flight from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur © Ruziana Mohd Mokhtar (see it in the gallery)
To view the clouds from an aircraft – to be up at their level – is to lose yourself in another world. When the low sun casts long shadows from the towering edifices of a Stratocumulus cloud, like the beauty shown above, that world seems to take the form of a fantastical cloud city.
It was just such a city that the American naturalist, Henry David Thoreau, observed in the sky off to the western horizon, and described in his journal on 10 July 1851:
“Between two stupendous mountains of the low stratum under the evening red, clothed in slightly rosaceous amber light, through a magnificent gorge, far, far away as perchance may occur in pictures of the Spanish coast viewed from the Mediterranean, I see a city, the eternal city of the West, the phantom city, in whose streets no traveler has trod, over whose pavements the horses of the sun have already hurried, some Salamanca of the imagination.”
Current Cloud of the Month:
Microbursts (May 08)
Previous Clouds of the Month:
Irridescent Clouds (April 08)
Northern Lights – Aurora Borealis (March 08)
Ice halos (February 08)
Lightning (January 08)
Roll Cloud (December 07)
Banner Cloud (November 07)
Stratocumulus (October 07)
The Unclassified Cloud (September 07)
Alexander’s Dark Band (August 07)
Fumulus Snail (July 07)
Distrail (June 07)
Altocumulus undulatus (May 07)
Cumulonimbus capillatus (April 07)
Lacunosus (March 07)
Horseshoe Vortex Cloud (February 07)
Jet-Stream Cirrus (Janurary 07)
Altostratus/Altocumulus/Altowhateveritis (December 06)
Anti-Crepuscular Rays (November 06)
Stratocumulus (October 06)
Altocumulus (September ’06)
The Kelvin-Helmholtz Wave Cloud (August ’06)
The ‘Brocken Spectre’ (July ’06)
‘Whale’s Mouth’ (June ’06)
Noctilucent (May ’06)
Cirrus (April ’06)
Cap Cloud (March ’06)
Fallstreak Holes (February ’06)
Nacreous (January ’06)
Cirrostratus (December ’05)
Tuba (November ’05)
Virga (October ’05)
Cirrocumulus (September ’05)
Altostratus (August ’05)
Cumulus (July ’05)
Mamma (June ’05)
Pileus (May ’05)
Lenticularis (April ’05)
Stratus (March ’05)
Cumulonimbus (February ’05)
Contrails (January ’05)
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