Clouds That Look Like Things

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‘Spotting shapes in clouds is a delightful way to pass a lazy afternoon. There's even a society dedicated to cloud spotting. It’s called the Cloud Appreciation Society, founded by Gavin Pretor-Pinney to foster understanding and appreciation of clouds, and to fight “blue sky thinking”. 

A clear blue sky has always been associated with good, happy weather – a perfect summer’s day, while cloudy skies are regarded as a metaphor for doom. Nothing could be more depressing, it seems, than to have ‘a cloud on the horizon’. Gavin Pretor-Pinney decided that this has to stop. “Someone needs to stand up for the clouds”, he says. So in 2004, he started the Cloud Appreciation Society and few months later launched a website. People sent in their cloud photograph, which he put up on the gallery pages for others to look at. The early trickle of submission soon swelled to a torrent. Today, it has over 29,000 members worldwide from 83+ different countries, and many thousands of amazing images.

Below is a collection of some of the most peculiar cloud formations.

Aladdin's lamp, spotted over The Torres del Paine National Park, Chile.

A baby floats over Zurich, Switzerland.

A dolphin leaping from an inky black sea over Sussex, UK.’ (Source) 

The girls finally get out of the water. Yeti shows them these beautiful pictures and tries to explain to them that it’s our mind that makes us see these animal shapes. Although he’s not 100% sure that he understands it.  

Tiffi mentions to him that it could be like when you see something but it’s not complete but your mind fills in the rest. She read somewhere that psychologists call it ‘part of a whole’. She uses the example of a sentence that has each letter of a word scrambled except for the first and last letter. Our brain can interpret the words as part of a whole, thereby they can read the entire sentence correctly.    

Let’s continue - Look at this, a group of people who love clouds!

Start at the beginning – Let’s go to the beach!