Cloud Time-Lapse #7
Channel: Chris DeLeon
Date: 17/07/2012

(Supports 1080p HD, use the gear in the bottom right to set quality. Recorded at Piedmont Park in Atlanta, GA on July 16, 2012.)

Doing this is giving me a reason to go outside every day, to sit someplace under the sky for 45-90 minutes while reading. It's giving me a context to learn more about camera settings, video formats, and YouTube features - things I've fallen behind on in pursuit of learning other things. It's helping me situate one of the topics that I'm reading about (clouds of course) in daily observation. It's making me see the navigable spaces around me differently, sizing up windows, rooftops, and hills based on their view of the clouds in various directions. It's making me get excited when rain is coming, or when it's going to be record-breaking hot outside, because either will yield terrific clouds.

Perhaps most importantly, it's giving me a reason to pay closer attention to some small part of the everyday beauty that we've widely become accustomed to ignoring--clouds like common wildlife or stars--because they can't be owned, therefore they can't be sold, therefore no company is marketing them to us in magazines, pre roll ads, or storefronts. They won't increase our income, they won't promise to solve all of our problems, they're never on sale, and they won't offer us any certifications nor high fashions to help us impress others. Clouds are completely and utterly unconcerned with us and everything about us, and in an odd sort of way, that's reassuring. Land-based life relies on them, and if we could make clouds mad, we surely would have by now.

We have a certain awe for plant and animal species that have kept on for hundreds of millions of years, and a different sort of awe for those that we believe could outlast nuclear war. However I am certain that clouds, very much like today's, were around well before the oldest forms of life, and aside from temporarily accepting the turbulence of some new pyrocumuli, will hardly notice should we make ourselves extinct.

This is happening every day, all over the world, whether we're watching them or not. Flying lakes composed of hundreds of tons of water, even the smaller of which are orders of magnitude larger in volume than the largest skyscrapers ever built, are appearing and disappearing overhead constantly, often with lifetimes well under an hour. 

You can't make this stuff up. Literally! If somehow conditions were not right to have clouds on Earth (and, imagining for a moment that we could still exist without the water cycle), and a science fiction author included the idea in a book about an alien planet, we'd call them out on the idea being pure, utterly absurd fantasy.