Creighton Lovelace, D.D. Pastor of Danieltown Baptist Church and member of the Cloud Appreciation Society has kindly shared his article with us, “A Survey of Cloud Symbolism in Christianity”

An adventure into the skies…

A magical, visually spectacular show for families, filled with swirling clouds, miniature houses and enchanting music.

Enter a world where clouds turn into sheep, shadows make beautiful patterns across walls and the imagination runs wild.

The show has been devised by Spanish company Aracaladanza who specialise in creating work for children and is showing at the Southbank Centre, London from Saturday 26th to Wednesday 30th July. Full details can be found on the Southbank Centre website

This month, we’ve selected Math Gossens photograph of summer lightning over the Netherlands. See the Cloud of the Month for July here…

Bridget Holding runs ‘Wild Words‘ creative writing workshops in nature. In the courses she often uses clouds as a subject around which to base a piece of creative writing. The next online course will be running for 6 weeks and starts on 22nd September 2014, full details can be found on her website.

Here is an article that Bridget wrote recently exploring her relationship with clouds:

About Clouds

In the watercolour wash blue of the midafternoon sky, clouds block the sun. They hurl shifting shadows on to the ground below. I throw my jumper off, tip my head and spread my arms wide to wallow in the warmth. Almost immediately, I have to drag my jumper on again, as I’m plunged into shade. A chill runs the length of my body.

I want the clouds to clear, immediately.

Closing my eyes, I notice clumped areas of fogginess inside me. My right hip, and my left little finger are indistinct entities. Many small phantoms flit across my forehead. What are they? What is kept there?

I want these too to clear, immediately, and leave my internal world a bright, limitless sky.

To distract myself, I decide to get interested in looking at the sky above, and remember that The Cloud Appreciation Society have been responsible for changing my opinion of clouds. External, and internal.

Gavin Pretor-Pinney speaks of clouds as ‘Nature’s poetry’. The Society pledges to fight ‘blue-sky thinking wherever we find it… Life would be dull if we had to look up at cloudless monotony day after day’. They’re right, aren’t they?

Clouds are indeed wonderful and varied. From the wisps that are the high cirrus clouds, to the vertically rising, bubbling cumulonimbus. From the little puff cakes of the middle layer of Altocumulus, to their companions the stretched, stringy altostratus.

Today’s clouds are cirrus- I would guess. They are a fine spreading mist, observed by a half moon, perching steady above them. I watch their slow motion, as they widen and spread to veil the sky. Like a skin, too thin. Or as if the sky wanted privacy.

Watching their forms bend and turn, with the smooth running of a yacht cutting through a calm sea, I’m re-inspired. I find the courage to look at those internal clouds.

As I touch their qualities in my body and mind, each frustrating, annoying, blocking little patch of absence of clarity starts to shift and shape change. And my forehead clears.

The Weekly Writing Prompt

Write a piece of prose using the following prompt:
“Clouds suit my mood just fine.”
― Marie Lu, Champion

Can your words form shapes as endlessly varied as the clouds?

We are very pleased to have added some rather stylish Cumulus cushions to our shop. Printed on both sides in bold black and white on soft, 100% cotton fabric, they are the height of etherial interior fashion.
See our new Cumulus Cushions in the cloud shop…

Bernard L Reymond recently sent us the link to NASA’s 21st May 2014 “Astronomy Picture of the Day” video. It reveals in a dramatic way how the structure of a supercell develops. For the full NASA explanation please go to their webpage

It is early in the morning, and it is in a foul mood.
See Cloud of the Month for May…

Writer and Author of “Confessions of a Middle-Aged Hippie”, Beverley Golden, recently contacted us following the publication of her article on the Huffington Post.
Her article begins “When you hear the word “cloud”, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind? In our technology driven world, I imagine that many immediately think of “cloud” in relation to the internet; a generally used term for anything that involves delivering hosted services there. Hmm. The word “cloud” conjures up something wonderfully and dramatically different for me.”

To continue reading please go to the full article on the Huffington Post website

This summer De Hallen Haarlem is staging a major exhibition about the sky in Dutch art since 1850. The museum will be showing a wide range of interpretations of the sky: from late Romantic artists like Schelfhout, by way of Impressionists like Weissenbruch and Mesdag, to contemporary artists like John Körmeling and Guido van der Werve. Some 150 paintings, sculptures, photographs and films show how inspiring the sky was and still is as a subject for artists.

The exhibition runs from 21 June – 7 September 2014 and f full details can be found on their website

It is a most beautiful demonstration that cloudspotting needn’t be confined to the daylight hours.
GO to the Cloud of the Month for April…

Cloud Appreciation Society founder, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, will be giving an illustrated talk about clouds as part of the Salisbury International Arts Festival. The talk will be at the beautiful Roche Court NewArtCentre in Wiltshire, UK, and will be followed by a tour of the sculpture park, which includes Peter Newman’s Skystation.
Date: 4 June 2014
Time: 6:30pm
Location: NewArtCentre, Roche Court, East Winterslow, Salisbury, Wiltshire SP5 1BG, UK
Tickets: from £18 + booking fee from the Salisbury International Arts Festival

Artist Keith Epps has an exhibition currently showing at the Union Gallery, Edinburgh until 1st April. Keith is a contributor to the art section of our website and some of these works will be included in the exhibition. If you are in Edinburgh, why not go and take a look. Full details can be found on the Union Gallery website here

And it is a fantastic example of the one-and-only ‘King of Clouds’.
Go to Cloud of the Month for March…

Cloud Appreciation Society Gallery Editor, Ian Loxley, has been selected to be a Judge in the Cloudscape section of the international photography competition “Exposure”, which celebrates the power of the image. He told us he is extremely proud to have been chosen and urges everyone to see the full details on the Exposure website here

Christiaan Korterink of Skyhigh TV in the Netherlands is looking for an expert who is really passionate about clouds to appear on the Dutch TV show “Milk and Honey”. If you are interested, please contact him directly via email at Christiaan.Korterink@skyhightv.nl or by telephone on +31 35 75 08 221

It is a superhuman lenticularis and you can see it here:
Cloud of the Month for February 2014…

As part of the ‘Festival of Imagination’ season at Selfridges, London, Cloud Appreciation Society founder, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, will be giving an illustrated clouds talk in the store’s new ‘Imanginarium’ space. Put on by our friends at The Lost Lectures, he talk will be a guide to identifying different cloud formations – from common ones to rare and obscure. Gavin will also explain why the aimless pastime of cloudspotting serves as an antidote to the pressures of the digital age and a great aid to stimulating the creative mind.

Date: Wednesday, January 22, 2014
Time: 6:30pm until 8:30pm
Location: Selfridges, 400 Oxford Street, W1A 1AB London
Tickets: £15 from eventbright.co.uk

You can find out more about The Festival of Imagination here…

It is a beautiful and dramatic celestial display, but will it upset the Cloud Appreciation Society sticklers?
See January’s Cloud of the Month…

Kevin Kendle is a musician working in the field of tranquil, atmospheric instrumental music. A composer and synthesizer player, Kevin produced an album in 2000 called “Clouds,” describing 8 cloud types in music. Just recently, Kevin has released the long-awaited sequel to this best-selling album, “Clouds 2,” on his own Eventide Music label, musically depicting a further 8 cloud types, and providing the perfect accompaniment to cloud spotting! The CD booklet also features photographs from the Cloud Appreciation Society’s web gallery to illustrate the cloud types that the music is about.

Based in Baldock, in the North Hertfordshire countryside, Kevin has been producing gentle, haunting music in his own studio since 1992, to international acclaim. He has become widely known for consistently producing quality music with very high production values. For more information, and to hear samples of the music, please visit: www.kevinkendle.com

Cloud enthusiast Trevor Field emailed to tell us about the new glass roof which is proposed for Paddington Station. It has been announced that as part of the Crossrail Art Programme artist Spencer Finch intends to create an index of clouds embedded within the glass of the centrepeice of the new station. We like the fact that he is proposing a broad range of different cloud types rather than just using one type. We think that this will offer great opportunities for cloudspotters to refresh their identification skills whilst waiting for their train.

You can read more about this innovative project here.

Azhy Hasan, Member No 1,687, has just organised an exhibition of cloud photographs by members of The Cloud Appreciation Society in his home city of Erbil in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. The show, called ‘A Carnival in the Sky’, took place over a weekend in the prestigious and dramatic setting of the Shanedar Gallery within one of the city’s parks. It was a great success with many hundreds of visitors passing though during the three days.

The visitors spanned all ages, from school children to religious elders, and came from a range of locations within Kurdistan and Iraq, as well as from Egypt, Iran, USA and China. One visitor from the Iranian region of Sardasht beckoned Azhy over when he noticed that his own name appeared in the caption to a photograph of high, wispy clouds over Erbil City. The man’s parents had named him Cyrus, after the great king of Ancient Persia. The name is pronounced “See-roos” in Persian – and so sounds like the Latin cloud name Cirrus, which means a lock of hair, that is used to describe this cloud type. “Today,” exclaimed Cyrus, “I was amazed to learn, for the first time in my life, that my name is the same as that of this most beautiful of clouds.”

Supported by the Kurdistan Ministry of Culture and Youth and the Media Directorate of Erbil, the exhibition included photographs taken by a number of Society members, who all kindly agreed for their wonderful images to be shown. The photographers, in addition to Azhy himself, were Peter Andermann, Lauren Antanaitis, Cristina Diaz, Ron Engels, Jörg Gundlach, Vicki Harrison, A.J. Hidding, Phil Holmes, Andrew Kirk, Ian Loxley, Paul Martini, Kamila Mazurkiewicz, Ally McGurk, Derek Mundil, Doug Short, Norman Shulman and Basil Stathoulis.

“As I gazed into the colours and shapes in these photographs,” commented a local poet, Mr Muhsen Awara, “I realised that you have given clouds a voice. Of course, I have always seen clouds from the ground or in a plane, but this is the first time I’ve seen such amazing shapes and formations. These clouds express themselves like a poem, and they have filled me with imagination and spiritual feelings.”

Mr Azad Hamadamin, President of the Kurdistan Journalists Syndicate, revealed how the exhibition made him consider the sky in a way that he never had before. “For the first time in my life,” he said, “I feel that clouds are a wonderful and almost living part of nature. Well done for this wonderful gift to our people and very best wishes to all who participated in this unique exhibition.”

Azhy Hasan was very grateful to all the photographers who agreed for their images to be in the exhibition. “Believe me, you made a new history in this country,” he said. “So many people here have been introduced to CAS, and many of them only now realise for the first time that clouds actually have names, rather than just being fuzzy shapes that drift across the sky.” The Society is pleased and proud to have been able to help Azhy’s great work to bring the beauty of clouds to the attention of the people of Erbil City.

Cloud Appreciation Society member, Ulrike Wilkens, has drawn our attention to this news article on the Spiegel Online website. The Sicilian volcano Mount Etna spews ‘smoke rings’ into the air which can be up to 200 meters in diameter. You can see the images here.

The San Francisco Bay Area is famous for its foggy conditions. So when Japanese artist, Fujiko Nakaya, was asked earlier this year to design a bridge for the city’s Exploratorium science centre she decided to make a Fog Bridge. Along the sides of the bridge was a series of 800 nozzles spraying a fine mist of water droplets into the air, which shrouded the walkway in a swirling blanket of cloud.

We at The Cloud Appreciation Society have long been fans of Fujiko Nakaya. She has, after all, made fog and cloud installations her lifetime’s work. Her passion for foggy art began back in 1970 when she engulfed in cloud the Pepsi Pavilion of the Osaka Expo. Recently, she created a Fog Square in Paris, while her 2011 Cloud Parking was installed in a rooftop car park in Litz, Austria. Nakaya uses a cloud-generating system that she devised with her long-time collaborator, the California-based cloud physicist Thomas Mee. High powered pumps capable force water through copper pipes dotted with nozzles. The nozzles have openings as small as 160 microns, or six-thousandths of an inch, in diameter and are fitted with microscopically sized pins that atomize the water into billions of ultra-fine fog droplets. Each of these measures between fifteen and twenty microns in diameter.

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Fujiko Nakaya’s fog installation at the Toyota Municiple Museum of art in Toyota, Aichi:

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Her Fog Bridge in San Francisco:

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Her Fog Square in Paris:

It’s a waterspout, and it explains why clouds sometimes rain fish…
See the Cloud of The Month for November.

Daniel Portolan works for Skye, AOL’s weather site and wanted to share their cool new infographic which offers a scrolling to guide to 11 extraordinary clouds and where they appear in the sky. The infographic also includes frames of reference for the viewer including Felix Baumgartner’s 2012 jump, the altitude of a standard jumbo jet, and a skydiver’s descent.

Visit the infographic here: The SKYE Guide to Extraordinary Clouds

We were recently contacted by Dr Caroline Murray of the Cambridge Library Collection who thought that some of our members might be interested to know that they have reissued some of Luke Howard’s works on clouds: Seven Lectures on Meteorology, Essay on the Modifications of Clouds and The Climate of London

Today, 2nd October 2013, the Cloud Appreciation Society photo gallery has reached a milestone with the 10,000th image being put up. The image, which we have selected as Cloud of the Month for October, was photographed by Anton du Preeze and shows a mamma formation over Cape Town, South Africa.

We’d like to thank all the contributors to the photo gallery for helping us reach impressive milestone.

Brand new website, BeautifulNow invites you to enter their Beautiful Clouds Photo Competition, open for entries from 16th 22nd September 2013. There are some really great prizes on offer so please click here to enter the BeutifulNow Clouds Competition

UPDATE: Cloud Appreciation Society members have been selected as semi-finalists in the BeautifulNow Cloud Competition! Check them out and get ready to vote for the winner this week (30th Sept to 4th October 2013)

Brenda Barnard, Cloud Appreciation Society Member No. 17887, suggested that it was about time we produced an ‘Urban Cloudspotter’ embroidered patch. The patch, she argued, is sorely needed by city dwellers and would nicely complement our existing ‘Flying Cloudspotter‘ patche (for pilots), ‘Seafaring Cloudspotter‘ patch (for sailors) and ‘Mountain Cloudspotter‘ patch (for walkers).

When we sent Brenda her patch as a thank you, she sent us back this photo of her wearing it out and about.

As you can see this was a great idea and so we are now pleased to announce that we have available on the Cloud Shop our brand new Urban Cloudspotter embroidered patches.

There’s gold in them clouds!
See Cloud of the Month for September…

Celebrate the enigmatic and ever-changing nature of fog and explore the science behind what is one of San Francisco’s most salient meteorological phenomena at the Exploratorium’s first-ever Fog Festival.

This looks to be a great event if you are in the area and will take place on Saturday, 28th September from 12pm to 5pm.

Full details can be seen on their website

Cloud Appreciation Society Member, Tricia Clark, sent us the link to an ABC news story about the very early arrival of the Morning Glory cloud over Sweers Island in Queensland’s Gulf of Carpentaria. These are usually visible from mid-September but made an appearance earlier this week on 13 August.

You can read the full article on the ABC Network website

NOVA is excited to announce the launch of the Cloud Lab a the third Lab in a growing collection of research offerings on the NOVA Labs site. In this NASA-funded site users can learn how to track the development of storms and better predict their impacts by conducting their own investigations about developing storms.
The Cloud Lab also includes a cloud gallery with 260 beautiful images. Users are challenged to analyze the cloud images and classify each cloud type they observe in the image—collecting favorites along the way.

Join them on Facebook
Follow them on Twitter @theNOVALabs

Society Founder Gavin Pretor-Pinney recently gave a 10-minute talk about cloudspotting at the TED Global conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. I has now been put up on the TED website, and you can see it here:
Watch ‘Gavin Pretor-Pinney: Cloudy with a Chance of Joy’ on TED.com

Users of our CloudSpotter iPhone app earn Stars and Achievements as they correctly identify the clouds that they photograph. But as they compete with each other to edge their way up the CloudSpotter Rankings page, they will also be helping scientists at NASA better understand and model how the clouds affect the Earth’s climate. We are excited to announce that NASA will be accessing the anonymous CloudSpotters data from around the world to fine-tune their state-of-the-art CERES cloud-observing satellite equipment. The instruments are central to scientists’ efforts to better predict how the Earth’s climate is likely to change over the decades to come because they will help us understand the complex role of clouds in determining ground temperatures. NASA will compare their satellite observations with the actual, verified, geo-tagged cloud observations by users of CloudSpotter, to see when their instruments are judging the clouds correctly. Of course, all the data we’ll make available to NASA is completely anonymous. One thing that we can all agree on about the future of the Earth’s climate is that the clouds are the big unknown. We have little idea whether warming average temperatures would result in more or less cloud cover. Nor do we know if a warming worlds would have an affect on the relative proportion of low clouds versus high clouds. It is a crucially important question since the low ones tend to have an overall cooling effect while the high ones tend to have a warming one. Clouds are considered the ‘wild cards’ in our attempts to accurately predict and model future temperatures. Whenever you have one of your cloud observations verified as correct by the CloudSpotter app, you will be helping scientists fine-tune the CERES cloud measurements, and so actively improving our ability to accurately model our future climate. More about the link between CloudSpotter and NASA…

CERES cloud-observing equipment aboard NASA’s Terra satellite. The CloudSpotter iPhone app teaches you about the different clouds and awards you stars as you build up your collection of photographs,

Cloud of the Month for July is radiating good vibes over Anchorage, Alaska.
See Cloud of the Month for July…

Cloud Appreciation Society member Michelle Arbon, is in the process of producing her next short film ‘Lunar Attraction’, and is running a competition for the best heart shaped cloud photograph. The winning cloud will be the design used in the film and the photographer will also win a whole host of goodies. For more information about the film, competitions and how to get involved please visit the competition page – the closing date for entries is 22nd July 2013.

Cloudspotter Chris Gathercole saw this artist’s project about using face recognition software to look at clouds.

Shinseungback Kimyonghun is a Seoul based tech art collective, focusing largely on computer vision. Their latest project, Cloud Face uses facial recognition to capture wisps and puffs of vapor that briefly converge to form the likeness of a human face.

It is remarkable work and you can read more about it You can read it here

Cloud Appreciation Society member, ‘H’ Brown sent us the link to this wonderful video showing a dynamic cloud column sculpture. Please take the time to view the whole video as it is pretty amazing!

Over the past year Clare Rose been collecting a sky diary, and using Facebook as a way of sharing these images with friends. Other people have joined in and it has been a great way to connect with people all over by looking at the same, but also very different sky.

Clare would love the chance to create a worldwide sky diary over the course of one day – June 21st, the solstice.

Over the course of the day, she is inviting people to capture three images of the sky. One in the morning, one in the afternoon and one again at evening/dusk – or night if people have the equipment and skills for night skies.
She is hoping to collect 1500 images of the sky from all over the world and from these images complete a series of paintings. She is not yet sure of the full scope of that, however you will be acknowledged in anything that comes of this endeavour. By submitting your photographs, you will be consenting for them to be used for any work, publication, artwork that might come of the event and all participants will be acknowledged.

So if you think you would like to be involved, or know someone who might be keen to participate, please sign up and spread the word.

Here is what to do:

1. Let Clare know you are going to take part – She needs at least 500 people to commit to this so invite your friends along. There’s an invitation on Facebook called fifteen hundred skies. Join!
www.facebook.com/events/499127830135320/?fref=ts

2. Set yourself a reminder to take photos on the 21st of June this year – in fact set three reminders, one for the morning, afternoon and again at dusk. It doesn’t have to be at the same time, people’s situations are all different, just choose three occasions over the day to take the time to look up and capture a sky. Just use your phone, don’t worry about having your camera. Whatever is convenient.

3. Take your images – it can include buildings, nature, anything – though the focus is the sky. It doesn’t have to be beautiful – it can be grey, misty whatever you are offered. It will change over the day!

4. Record three words to capture where you are at, what might be on your mind, how you feel, what the sky “says” to you, memories – just three words. It might seem completely random – that’s ok.

5. Record where you are – e.g. Oxford St, London, UK, paddock, Grass Valley, WA, Mount Cook, South Island, New Zealand and the approximate time. e.g. 2pm, mid afternoon.

5. Send your images through to fifteenhundredskies@yahoo.com along with your words and locations.

6. Watch this space. If Claire knows you are taking part, she can keep you involved in what happens with this project so please let her know.

Any questions/suggestions, please email Clare or post a message on the Facebook event page.

Only 6 weeks to go – spread the word, She needs your help to get this off the ground – literally- and start looking up!