Those were fanning out due to perspective and added even more drama to this scene. You can also see the rays (called crepuscular rays) extending above and to the left of the cloud to the left of the frame. There were several dozen of them, by my count. Look again at the wide-angle shot you can see the bumps all over the clouds along their lines. As I did, I noticed to my amazement that there were fluctus clouds everywhere. So I had to put the camera down and just look. The clouds lasted a couple of minutes longer.įunny, too: I only took about 10 pictures before my camera battery ran out (I should have noticed the indicator light warning me). Besides the clouds not lasting long, the angle of the Sun and the clouds behind them changed rapidly as well, and literally two minutes after I took these shots the shadows were gone. So it was lucky I happened to spot them out my window.īut it was even luckier than that. Here's a wider view to give you context:Īs you can see in the video, the clouds don't last long they tend to break up pretty quickly. You just don't see linear structure like this very often in the sky, and not aligned so dramatically to boot.Īnd it's not like the sky around them was holding back either. Not only that, the Sun was illuminating them from below, and they were casting their shadows on the cloud bank behind them! The parallel shadows made this a really striking view. That's what I happened to catch in the photo. You can get a repeating pattern of them across a cloud line, forming a saw-blade-like structure.

They form when you get a layer of air blowing over a slower moving layer a small blip in the lower layer gets blown up and over by the layer above, and forms the shape of a breaking wave. Those waves in the cloud line are called fluctus clouds or, more mouth-fillingly, Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds. But if you know what you're seeing, it gets a lot cooler. Yeah, I know, right? Even if you don't know clouds well, that's a really weird and cool sight. Fluctus at sunset: Wave clouds created by a layer of air flowing over another.

Fluctus villas