A Cloud A Day

Description

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.

Gavin Pretor-Pinney is the founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society, an organisation with a growing international fanbase that aims to fight 'blue-sky thinking'. He has given talks about the sky for TED (over 1.2M views) and Google, and organises cloudspotting trips and international sky gatherings. He has presented television documentaries for the BBC and Channel 4 and is a Visiting Fellow at the Meteorology Department of Reading University and winner of the Royal Meteorological Society's Michael Hunt award. Gavin is a co-founder of the Idler magazine and the author of the internationally bestselling Cloudspotter's Guide and Cloud Collector's Handbook. His third book, The Wavewatcher's Companion, won the prestigious Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books. He lives in Somerset.

'[This] charming little volume reminds us that self-care is as available as a glance out the window, no matter your age or infirmities' * The New York Times * 'A confident celebration of our ever-changing skies... I defy anyone who reads it not to start taking furtive peeks out the window.' -- Robert Leigh-Pemberton * Daily Telegraph * 'Turn to A Cloud A Day for some suitable celestial inspiration' * The Field * 'Beautifully varied and fascinating' * The Idler * 'A gorgeous celebration of the wonder of clouds' * The People's Friend *