More than 100 people assembled on the outskirts of Cheyenne, Wyoming, on 15 June for the official kickoff of construction on the NCAR–Wyoming Supercomputing Center.

In the spring of 2009, researchers on the Second Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment (VORTEX2) field project set out across the Great Plains to study tornadoes, but that’s not the only phenomenon they observed.

Turboprop and jet aircraft can create hole-punch clouds, which have long fascinated the public.

Between 1969 and 1971, NCAR scientist John Eddy set out to archive an important part of the history of both photography and astronomy. Eddy collected more than 100 pictures of total solar eclipses taken from the late 1800s into the mid-1900s.

They’ve been called “crop circles in the sky.” Across the world, sightings of oddly circular holes within cloud layers—dubbed hole-punch clouds by scientists—have triggered bemusement and speculation.