Instead, from the origin of humanity, we humans have chosen to look at the sky, and not just to predict the weather. We observe the stars and planets with laborious obsession, we created astronomical charts and knew that the Earth was round. We look
the stars to understand where we were standing, to move, to navigate and even to conquer foreign lands. Since we discovered agriculture, we have observed the sky and the position of the stars to keep track of time and plan crops. For centuries, much of the work of astronomical observatories.

     Westerners was dedicated to looking at the sky to know precisely the time of day and thus organize the functioning of society, work and production. Other ways of observing the sky organize not only the functioning of a society, but also its spiritual, religious and cultural life. It has been 300,000 years since humans have looked to the sky in order to survive on earth.

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      Clouds have been, throughout the history of sky observation, an elusive phenomenon, difficult to grasp, especially for sciences eager to name and classify. It took the science that powered enlightenment more than a century to colonize them. Clouds, changing ornaments, mutants, which hang from the sky and can disappear from one second to another, resisted being counted and named. It was not until 1803, when the young English pharmacist Luke Howard, a keen climate observer, published his On Modifying Clouds that an international language for naming clouds was established, one that eventually transcended their transient nature. Thus, what had previously vanished into thin air without materializing in a word began to be called cumulus, stratus, or cirrus, or a combination of the three previous categories: nimbus, the plump, rain-laden cloud.

     The scientific community took decades to accept these categories, it needed material and concrete evidence: it needed images that would declare their veracity and could be accumulated in the form of scientific knowledge. Albert Riggenbach was the first to successfully capture the image of the cirrus, and one of the creators of the first International Cloud Atlas in 1896, which featured 28 color plates accompanied by definitions and descriptions of clouds, as well as instructions for their Observation in Three Languages: A Landmark of Early Globalization. Once the first cloud was captured there was no going back. From that moment on, every cloud was global, static, and a combination of up to three possible categories. The pure and childish fantasy vanished between the pages of the atlas and no cloud could be unique and unrepeatable.