John A. Day.
The Book of Clouds.
Sterling Publishing. 2006
In the sky are clouds and optical effects with names like sun dog, corona, silver lining, and glory. There’s the green flash, sea smoke, the cap cloud, and sun pillars. And there are all those classifications we learned in school, but perhaps have forgotten: cumulus, stratus, nimbostratus, cirrus, and more.
In The Book of Clouds, John Day, known around the world as the Cloudman introduces, or reintroduces, us to earth’s great skyscape. His spectacular portfolio of cloud photographs forms the centerpiece of these glorious pages. A stunning cloud chart, an explanation of how clouds form, hints on forecasting, observing and photographing clouds, and his “Ten Reasons to Look Up” (the first one is, “It’s the greatest free show on earth”), show us how to use our “inner eye” to really see the familiar fleeting forms that seem to float effortlessly above.
John Day has a Ph.D. in cloud physics and a long career as a professor of meteorology. Yet for him, observing clouds goes far beyond the scientific. As he writes, “Never does my soul feel so nourished as when I look up and really see the clouds—those elusive, captivating, ephemeral gifts of nature.”