The New Zealand town of Middlemarch in the Otago region of the country’s South Island is one of the few places in the world to have a pet cloud. It’s known locally as the Taieri Pet, a name it has had since at least the 1890s. This Altocumulus lenticularis cloud forms regularly when north-westerly winds flow over the steep, flat-topped Rock and Pillar mountain range. The Taieri Pet forms where the airflow cools most on the leeside of the range as it rises in a long wave before dipping back down again beyond. This local name for the regular visitor is not widely known even in New Zealand, but it gained international exposure when the cloud was spotted recently by the Operational Land Imager on NASA’s Landsat 8 satellite – appearing from Space more like a pet slug than a pet cloud.

NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.