Saturday 6th December 2025

Sunsets are an invitation to pause and take a breath. You’ll need to take a deep one before you identify the golden clouds spotted over Zagreb, Croatia by Sena Zutic (Member 5,882). They are (inhale): Cirrus fibratus radiatus duplicatus with mamma. Let’s break that down, one word at a time.

Cirrus are high-altitude clouds composed of ice crystals, and the fibratus classification is added when they’ve been teased out into long filaments by the wind. We class clouds as the radiatus variety when they stretch across enough of the sky to seem to emanate from a point on the horizon. The variety duplicatus, meaning ‘doubled’, is when the same main cloud – Cirrus, in this case – appears at more than one distinct level. And finally, those distant bumpy pouches in the deep amber-coloured region towards the horizon are features known as mamma, which can be found hanging from the underside of several of the main cloud types, including Cirrus.

Now, take another deep breath, forget all those Latin words, and just enjoy the sunset.




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