When the sky is covered in a high layer of ice crystals, known as a Cirrostratus cloud, there is always a possibility for dramatic halo phenomena…

During the first days of February, strange and beautifully coloured cloud formations were noticed by many cloudspotters across Britain and Ireland…

Mountains love dressing up in clouds. They wear them over their rocky slopes like delicate, flowing robes of moisture…

Cloudspotting mountaineers and hill walkers on the Brocken mountain in Northern Germany often find themselves climbing through a bank of stratus cloud to emerge into the sunlight above…

You know those glorious fingers of sunlight that sometimes burst out from behind clouds? They’re called ‘crepuscular rays’, they form when light and shadow are rendered visible by haze in the atmosphere…

Regularity in the natural world always feels surprising to us – the uniform hexagon formations of honeycombs, the intricate fractal swirls of ferns, a regular pattern of clouds…

September is a big month for the Cloud Appreciation Society, as we are holding our ten-year anniversary event in London…

Close your eyes, think of a cloud, and it’s probably a Cumulus that comes to mind…

For July’s Cloud of the Month, we’ve chosen a formation that was accepted as a new type of cloud a few weeks ago…

The Altocumulus lenticularis cloud is an ‘orographic’ cloud formation, which means that it tends to form as winds are forced upwards to pass over mountains…

Low clouds like Cumulus tend to consist of water droplets. High ones like Cirrus are made of ice crystals…

April’s cloud of the month looms over Lake Tuggeranong, in the south of Canberra, Australia, resplendent in the golden rays of the evening…

Formations like these over Warwick, southeast Queensland, Australia are often described as ‘jellyfish clouds’ on account of the tendrils that dangle below them…

Once observed, never forgotten. That’s what they say about the celestial light display known as the aurora borealis, or northern lights…

Cloud of the Month for January is a classic, UFO-shaped Altocumulus lenticularis cloud…

hat could be more festive than a couple of colourful sundogs, in the Cirrostratus skies of northern Italy, seated on either side of a warm, fiery Sun?…

How and where a cloud releases its load to earth can vary greatly with the type of cloud. In the case of November’s Cloud of the Month, a large Cumulonimbus over the Mongolian Steppe, the precipitation is sudden…

Cloudspotters are often to be found gazing wistfully to the west as the dying rays of the setting sun drop behind Cumulus towers on the distant horizon…

A pileus formation is a smooth cap of cloud that appears on top of a large Cumulus congestus that is building rapidly upwards in the sky…

This month’s image, which rightfully belongs in our ‘clouds that look like things’ section, had residents in Exeter, UK, gazing up in disbelief as what looked like a flying carpet passed overhead…

Lightning heats the air around it to a temperature equivalent to four times that of the surface of the Sun. It does so within just a few millionths of a second…

Still water can act as a fantastic mirror on the sky, giving you two cloudscapes for the price of one…

Sunrise is often a tranquil and peaceful scene, perhaps with some wisps of Cirrus cloud or a patch of fair-weather Altocumulus – even, heaven forbid, clear blue skies…

We think of cloudspotting as a predominantly daytime activity. But, as the Cloud of the Month for April shows, it needn’t be when there is a full moon…

This Month’s formation boldly goes where no cloud has gone before. Resembling the Starship Enterprise, it is in fact a dramatic example of a Cumulonimbus incus…