One music hall had several acoustical clouds suspended from the ceiling, however the architect forgot to take into consideration that heat from the audience and the performers could send the acoustical clouds spinning around over the heads of the audience and therefore the architect had to come up with a better solution.
2. The group or system of electrons revolving around the nucleus of an atom; a cloud-like group of electrons.
3. In a vacuum tube, the area between the electrodes that contains a great number of relatively stationary electrons.
Because these clouds are linked with the form of the terrestrial relief, they generally move very slowly, if at all, although the winds at the same level may be very strong.
Heaps: Cumulus family clouds:
- Fair weather cumulus
- Swelling cumulus
- Cumulus congestus
Layers: Stratus family clouds:
- Altostratus
- Cirrostratus
Layered Heaps clouds:
- Stratocumulus
- Altocumulus
- Cirrocumulus
Precipitating clouds:
- Cumulonimbus
- Cirrus
- Nimbostratus
The process has never been very successful.
Before 1800, observers spoke of clouds only as essences floating in the sky. Clouds had no names and were not well understood.
Luke Howard noted that there are three basic shapes to clouds: heaps of separated cloud masses with flat bottoms and cauliflower tops, which he named cumulus, Latin for "heap"; layers of clouds which are much wider than they are thick, like a blanket or a mattress, which he named stratus, Latin for "layer"; wispy curls, like a child's hair, which he called cirrus, Latin for "curl". To clouds generating precipitation, he gave the name nimbus, Latin for "rain".
The cold temperatures in the upper atmosphere turn aircraft vapor into ice crystals that look like cirrus clouds.
Up until about 1800, there were no general classifications of clouds
Clouds were referred to poetically or as vague essences floating in the sky.
As an English manufacturing chemist and pharmacist, Luke Howard, like many who observed and studied the workings of the atmosphere at that time, was an amateur meteorologist.
Although he produced several landmark works including On the Modification of Clouds, The Climate of London, and Seven Lectures on Meteorology, the first textbook about weather, he was never trained as a scientist but from an early age, he had a fondness for nature and the weather, particularly the clouds.
Luke Howard divided clouds into basic shapes with Latin classifications: cumulus, stratus, cirrus, and nimbus.
Each cloud type is formed under different conditions.
His fascination with clouds started with the incredible skies of 1783 between May and August of that year. The Northern Hemisphere sky was filled with a "Great Fogg", a haze composed of dust and ash that caused brilliant sunrises and sunsets which resulted from the violent volcanic eruptions in Iceland (Eldeyjar) and Japan (Asama Yama).
In addition to the spectacle of the continuous volcanic ash in the sky, there was a fiery meteor which flashed across western European skies during the early evening of August 18, which was observed by the eleven year-old Luke Howard.
Before the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, most weather observers believed that clouds were too transient, too changeable, and too short-lived to be classified or even analyzed.
With few exceptions, no cloud types were named; they were just described by their color and form as each individual saw them: dark, white, gray, black, mare's tails, mackerel skies, wooly fleece, towers and castles, rocks and oxes-eyes.
Clouds were used in a few situations as weather forecasting proverbs, but mostly by their state of darkness or color:
"Red sky in morning, sailor take warning."
"Mackerel skies and mare's tails, make lofty ships carry low sails."
The Oort cloud is postulated as the source of comets entering the solar system and is named after the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, who theorized its existence in 1950.
The Oort Cloud is a spherical region extending for trillions of miles or kilometers that contains debris flung outward by the giant planets after they formed.
It is believed that comets that orbit the sun in periods of thousands or millions of years usually come from the Oort Cloud.