Taken with a 250-mm lens, this photograph also shows high peaking cumulus cloud topping out into cirrus at the tropopause. Photographed over the Gulf of Mexico, the artistic lighting is partly supplied by oblique photography into a low Sun angle, but the soft-focus effect is caused by high levels of aerosol haze in the atmosphere. Deep-based convective clouds over water are almost always seeded by giant salt nucleii.

STS 41-D, August-September 1984. Picture #14-33-005.

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