This Indiana Image Is Quite Startling But Also Quite Common

I'd always wanted to take a good picture of lightning, and I got one about a decade ago in Muhlenberg County. Always keep your camera (phone) handy.

I've been prepared for the "next great meteorological image" ever since, but, so far, to no avail, in terms of the atmosphere doing me a big favor. A man named Hunter Womack was quick with his iPhone or smartphone Wednesday morning in Mt. Vernon, when the atmosphere did him a big favor.

Vertical Cloud

I have never seen anything like that before, but Google has. I put it into Google lens and learned some more fascinating information about the weather. At first, I thought it looked like a rocket launch, but since NASA doesn't have a facility in southern Indiana that I know of, I quickly dismissed the thought.

As it turns out, there's not much very exciting about it at all, but I am curious about the verticality. The Google results indicate an ordinary, everyday contrail, and a British media website says that it appears vertically because the "aircraft would have flown straight across the viewer."

Okay, fine. But I've seen planes fly across the sky, "straight" in front of me, and the contrails never looked like something just launched. I know that, depending on which way the aircraft is flying, that a contrail can appear to be vertical or horizontal. But we all know those contrails are parallel to the ground, and this one doesn't look like that. It actually resembles this. (And no, it's not vertical.)

Oh well, I'm going to have to deal with it. Since I wrote the last sentence in the previous paragraph, I tried hard to dig deeper, and I get getting "optical illusion." I also found lots of examples.

Are we supposed to be experiencing illusions this frequently?