A Cloud A Day

Passionate cloud spotter and bestselling author Gavin Pretor-Pinney gives you a cloud a day in his new book.

We know that spending a few moments a day with your head in the clouds has a profound effect on your well-being, which is why Gavin's Cloud Appreciation Society sends a cloud image and story every day to its members. This forms the basis of a book of 365 cloud images, sometimes with a short piece of cloud science, an inspiring sky quotation or a detail of the sky depicted in a classic painting. They are clouds to inspire a moment of calm atmospheric contemplation each day. The author believes when science and art combine, you create wonder.

The book helps explain almost every kind cloud type in easy laymen terms, from fair weather cumulus to the lenticularis cloud (a distinctive disc shape that forms due to rising and dipping flow of wind over mountain peaks). From Rupert Brooke 'Clouds' poem to Nasa images of Actinoform clouds, which are radial, leaf-like patterns of clouds only visible from space. From suggested explanations of the skies painted by Van Gogh to the various names given to crepuscular rays (beams of light from between clouds that are called Jacob's ladder in much of the Western world, but Buddha's rays in Sri Lanka).

A wondrous, beautifully illustrated book to inform, delight and inspire. The perfect book to make you stop for a moment each day and look at the sky.