The sky is the best and most accessible arena on Earth to think about physics! Physical Meteorology is a survey of atmospheric optics, cloud physics, atmospheric electricity, atmospheric radiation, and satellite remote sensing.
A NASA astronaut photograph of clouds, the blue haze of the upper troposphere and stratosphere, and the moon rising above the top of the atmosphere. A nice example of clouds, chemistry, and radiation.
Henry Thoreau, a naturalist and environmentalist who lived in the 19th Century, said of the cloudscapes: “Such fantastic feathery scrawls of gauze-like vapor on the elysian ground! We never tire of the drama of sunset. I go forth each afternoon and look into the west a quarter of an hour before sunset, with fresh curiosity, to see what new picture will be painted there, what new panorama exhibited, what new dissolving views. Can Washington Street or Broadway show anything as good? Every day a new picture is painted and framed, held up for half an hour, in such lights as the Great Artist chooses, and then withdrawn, and the curtain falls.“
