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Thank you so much, this really does mean a lot to me.

I'm also learning everyday while working on this project. My weather talk has gotten so good. Also, it's nice when you've gotten used to really look at the small things in the sky, because you are never ever bored.

I love this! I think it's pretty difficult to take good pictures of the sky in general. I mean, I think it gets difficult when you're trying to capture something specific, because then the difference between what you see and what the camera sees becomes much more obvious.

Although cameras are much better at looking straight at the sun, which is a definite advantage.

Thank you for your kind words!

Thank you so much for following along, it makes such a difference to me! I appreciate it!

Thank you, I hope this can remain true for a long time!

Hi, thank you for your message! This is so interesting to me, please go ahead! I don't mind it at all. It's sweet of you to ask.

Thank you so much, this is so lovely. I'm so lucky that my work is able to reach people who appreciate it.

Thank you so much, this is very sweet! It means a lot to me.

I love this, thank you so much for your message! I hope Reports can stay high on the list of favourite finds 🫡

I really appreciate it, thank you! It means a lot to me.

Thank you so much! Back in 2020, I made one book per season, and then a complete collection of the first year, but then found it difficult to find the right companies to print/ship with reliably. I’m currently writing something for potential editors, to try and put this project out there the right way! I’m awful at this stuff, so wish me luck…

[Video ID: A slideshow featuring 24 square pastel drawings of the sky, each one depicting a different hour of the day in chronological order. /end ID]

I usually like to take milestones as excuses to try something new and confusing with Reports. This year, I missed the 5-year anniversary back in March, so the 2000 days anniversary had to be extra new and confusing. I made one report for each hour of the day: small squares drawn with wax pastels, interrupted sentences, one short minute at a time.

In the end, the sky is the sky, so a temporary change in format like this can still make sense, which is nice to realise. I do have to say, after trying this out, I have no plans to start posting hourly! We’ll keep doing the daily thing.

Thank you so much for paying attention to this project, whether you have a look once in a while, or it’s a daily meeting. This means a lot to me. Also, this is my first time running one of these little celebrations on tumblr, and it was so lovely to see everyone’s reactions as the day went on, so thank you for that as well.

That being said, the short text adventure that I made for the 1000 days milestone in 2022 is still available on itch!

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The four-meter long pastel drawing I worked on this summer, finally finished.

Hi! Thank you so much, I’m so glad this project is reaching looking at the sky enjoyers! It truly is the best hobby in the world to me. This is such a sweet message, and PLEASE don’t worry about the notifications, I’m overjoyed that this project is able to resonate with you!

Hi! This is such an interesting question.

First of all, thank you so much for your kind words, I’m so so glad you’re enjoying this project!

And then, I don’t think there’s a specific place, and I don’t think anyone is keeping track of that anywhere.

I do archive all of the reports on my website, though I’m missing a few months at this point (I need to fix this as soon as possible, and also the 2020 reports are under the Reports From Unknown Places drop down menu, I know it’s confusing).

One thing that I only mentioned a few times here is the short text adventure that I made to celebrate 1000 days of reports back in 2022 (I can’t believe we’re about to celebrate 2000 days in September). I don’t know if this counts as lore, but it’s a special little extra. It’s free to play in-browser on itch.

For a little bit of meta, I’ve got two short comics that are related to my interest in meteorology: 1 and 2

Generally speaking, I’ll admit that I like my mysteries and muddied waters, so the actual lore you might be after is veeery scattered, and really unnecessary. I wouldn’t want to send anyone on a wild goose chase when most of the reports are really just about the weather.

If this doesn’t quite answer your question, please let me know! In my #FAQ tag I’ve also got some posts in which I give clouds-related resources.

Your message made me soooo happy, thank you so much. The years pass and I find myself more and more grateful for the chance of making and sharing Reports. It’s impossible to say how wonderful it is to me that they’ve had any sort of impact. I’m so glad we now share this love of the sky!

cleverreports:

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We report as light moves from the sky to the street lamps: there is a patch of wasteland between two houses where heather blooms in the summer. Our expert took us there tonight, and the crickets could be heard from down the road, and the smell of the dry brush coloured the air.

identifying-clouds:

cleverreports:

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We report: in the small hours of the morning, we caught a few fairies dancing far above the storm. They immediately hid from view again, obviously self-conscious of our noticing them. Our expert whispered about transient luminous events, as though afraid of spooking them away.

Ok so this is a painting, and a very good one at that, but this is a really real, and really cool phenomenon!

They’re called red sprites, or just sprites, and they happen overtop of really powerful thunderstorms (cumulonimbus clouds). They happen in the ionosphere, about 50km above the surface (for reference, cirrus clouds are typically found at 4-14km in temperate regions). So really, very high up!

They’re apparently formed very similarly to auroras, both australis and borealis, but I don’t know enough about auroras to know how they happen.

They only last for a second, and are already really rare, so it’s really difficult to get a picture of them before they disappear.

And sometimes, they have a halo too! The halo is called an elve/elf. Other times, they connect to a type of lightning called a blue jet, which shoots upways from the top of a cumulonimbus.

A lot of images of sprites with elves look like a jellyfish!

Love the details about red sprites. This is the fourth time I’ve drawn them for Reports and I’m a big fan. They’re basically magic to me. If anyone wants to learn more about Transient Luminous Events, these wonderful phenomena that all have really whimsical names, I want to recommend Paul M. Smith and Pecos Hank’s YouTube videos about them, since they’ve both done great work documenting them. Pecos Hank is even known for discovering ghosts (Green emissions from excited Oxygen in Sprite Tops), which are these very faint green glows that can appear after red sprites fade away. All this TLE stuff is fairly recent (although it was predicted to exist as early as the 1920s!), and quite fascinating.

I think it’s delightful in a bit of a cosmic horror way to learn about gigantic jets and how they can reach up to 90 km into the atmosphere (that’s about 56 miles).

As usual, I’m no expert either, but since we mentioned auroras already, the way they form is indeed very similar, it’s just that all the excitement comes from outer space. Basically, when the sun parties a little too hard and it ejects a lot of plasma mass, it causes disturbances among the charged particles in our magnetosphere, which then precipitate into the higher parts of our atmosphere, and thus the ionosphere. This is where, as @identifying-clouds mentioned, all the fun stuff happens. When the process of ionisation occurs, a bunch of photons are released. Among other things, the height at which this happens will determine the colour that we perceive.

Right now, we’re at the height of a Solar cycle, and it’s my understanding that there’s a lot of solar activity going on, which explains all the wild auroras we’ve been witnessing (in May of last year, we had the biggest solar storm in 20 years, if you’ll recall, the auroras were visible in Mexico and South Africa, wild).

This is my limited understanding of the stuff that happens above our heads, take it with a grain of salt!

I couldn’t resist reblogging this one, thanks @identifying-clouds!