Category: Attention All Cloudspotters

You can’t look around when you’re looking up, so we’ve had a look around for you.
If you have cloud news that you think we should include here, please email it to us at: hello@cloudappreciationsociety.org.

The Cloudman Cometh

wethrmn5.jpgWe were very excited to be contacted by the one and only John Day of Oregon, USA. He is commonly known as the Cloudman, as he has devoted his latter years to photographing, enthusing about and explaining the clouds. His website is full of fantastic images and information. We recommend it highly.
Indeed, eagle-eyed cloudspotters will notice that society founder, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, was filmed reading John Day’s book in the first of his short programmes about clouds and the Morning Glory. The fact that he fell asleep having read it should not be taken as evidence that it is anything other than a great book.
Visit John Day’s website:http://www.cloudman.com

 

Man-Made Clouds That Aren’t Contrails

picture-3.jpgSoon-to-be-member, John Diefenbach, is based in Japan and has filmed the world’s last mainline steam trains, which operate in Inner Mongolia. Filming in mid-winter, with temperatures down to -30C, the steam effects, in some cases, are spectacular. We told him that we are cloudspotters, not train spotters, but it is fair to say that there is not much difference between what comes out of the train’s funnel and a time-lapse image of a cumulus cloud. Similar to the case of the UPS cloud stamps mentioned below, John’s films will be the ultimate for cloud enthusiasts who are also train nerds.
See John’s films at:
http://www.bachsitetoo.com

Jack Borden and For Spacious Skies

cert.gifWe were contacted recently by the venerable Jack Borden, Boston TV news reporter turned sky enthusiast. At the age of 45 he woke up from a nap in a nature preserve to see a sky he had never experience in all his previous life. “In a millisecond I saw more of the sky than in all my life to that point,” he says. He decided to quit his job and become a missionary of the sky. For Spacious Skies is the campaign he’s been running for twenty years or so to get school children and everyone else to pay more attention to what’s going on above us.
http://www.forspaciousskies.com/

 

Cloudspotter and Stamp Collectors Unite

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us_stamps.jpgIf you are a cloudspotter who collects stamps, prepare to have an orgasm. The US Postal Service has issued a set of stamps starring fifteen different types of cloud. All basic genera are featured except, that is, for the nimbostratus. But then it is a bit of a wet, wingey cloud, so we guess it’s fair enough.