Rambling: Clouds

Stop sometime and just look at the clouds. They are fascinating in and of themselves. All they are is innumerable water droplets suspended in the air thousands of feet above the ground. Yet within them can be seen patterns and shapes on an otherwise calm day. At sunset and sunrise, they catch the long wavelengths of the sun's rays and reflect the myriad of colors to our eager eyes. What an amazingly simply and beautiful creation clouds are! What a God to think of something like that!

Clouds have always fascinated me. As a kid, I used to love to look up into a deep azure sky on a calm summer afternoon and pretend that I was floating along in the clouds. What I never noticed as a kid, though, is that there are numerous different cloud types. Clouds are classified first by their altitude then by their appearance and composition. The three levels are low level clouds, which have no prefix, mid-level clouds, which have the prefix "alto-" and high-level clouds, which have the prefix "cirro-." The appearance of a cloud determines the second half of the name: cumulus, stratus, and other words describe the different structures.
If I remember, over the next several posts, I'll go through the different types of clouds and describe a little bit about them, complete with as many pictures as I have.