Dragon-Shaped Clouds: Spotted One in the Evening Sky
One evening I was out walking and saw a dragon in the sky. Not a real one, of course – a fairy-tale dragon made of clouds and imagination :-)
I couldn’t resist taking a photo: you don’t see something like this every day.
A dragon’s head in the evening sky
Don’t you agree it looks a lot like a dragon’s head?
And here’s the full shot: the rain clouds form the dragon’s body, and you can even make out the wings :-)
The whole sky: the body and wings made of clouds, with my shadow at the bottom
Why we see dragons in clouds
There’s a name for this – pareidolia. It’s the tendency to see familiar images in random patterns: faces, animals and objects in clouds, stains on a wall or rocks. It isn’t a disorder or one person’s wild imagination, just the brain doing its usual job: it keeps looking for familiar shapes and fills in the rest of the picture. That’s why one person sees a dragon and another sees a dog or a ship.
The clouds in the photo are cumulus. In fair weather they are white and fluffy, but when the air is warm and moist they grow taller during the day, darken at the base and can bring a short downpour. The cloud keeps growing and changing shape, so the figure doesn’t last long – a little later the dragon is just a heap of cloud.
So if you spot something interesting in the sky, get your phone out straight away.
Nature is like that, full of little mysteries.