Mackerel Sky

Although I have seen the effect many times while photographing the skies over the lake at our cabin in Wisconsin, I had never heard the term “mackerel sky” until recently when I was looking at the website of the photographer Nick Reader where he has an image titled “Mackerel Sky at Polzeath.”

Wikipedia defines a mackerel sky as “a term for clouds made up of rows of cirrocumilus or altocumulus clouds displaying an undulating, rippling pattern similar in appearance to fish scales caused by high altitude atmospheric waves.”

I decided to go back through my images and see if I had inadvertently cap- tured this phenomena with the my camera. I found several images which showed the effect to some extent, but the best example from my own work was one I had taken in June of 2017 just after sunset. It was in among a group of images I had taken of the sunset that evening, but I had ignored it for other, what I thought were more interesting images. So I took another look with my new found awareness of the “mackerel sky” concept. Below is the result of that second look.

Mackerel Sky at Sunset | 17-0022