These flying saucers aren’t alien visitors. They’re lenticular clouds, which form when air flowing over the ground encounters an obstacle, such as a mountain. This causes the air to rise and cool, which can allow moisture to condense and form these clouds. For lenticular clouds to form, the atmosphere needs to be stable, which means that the air forced up readily sinks back down again and can continuously rise and fall downstream like ripples in the air, which you can see here.

Photographer Kathleen Macleod captured this photo in Inverness in the Scottish Highlands, where there are plenty of peaks on which these clouds can form:

“We are lucky to get amazing lenticular clouds with our topography.”

The scene is made all the more special by the beautiful sunset. Sunsets have warm hues of light since the sun’s rays travel far through the atmosphere, and the bluer frequencies of light get scattered away through Rayleigh scattering.

Photo location: Inverness, Scotland 

Photographer based: Inverness, Scotland 

Camera: iPhone