Noctilucent cloud

I've taken some pleasing photos today - we spent this evening on an informational guided walk through Benmore Gardens with the curator, in a group surrounded by a million midges as we learned about the work being done to clear and replant and propagate species in the gardens. And then we went for a walk to see the sunset sky on the Ardyne track, and that was glorious.

But because of its rarity, I have to post this photo that I took in the early hours, hanging out of the window just before 1am. This is a noctilucent cloud, a phenomenon that I have learned about only recently and which is as fascinating as it is dramatic to see. If you follow the link, you may get as far as the bit that suggests that the increasing frequency of sightings of this type of cloud may be like a miner's canary in warning of climate change.

But last night I only knew the name of what I was seeing, and that was enough for me. That and the strange beauty of the cloud in an otherwise clear sky.

Note: Wikipedia is acting very oddly, refusing to take me back to the page where I found the article, so I'm going to reproduce the relevant bits below. You can try the link that is refusing to cooperate if you want more detail! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctilucent_cloud

Night clouds or noctilucent clouds are tenuous cloud-like phenomena that are the "ragged edge" of a much brighter and pervasive polar cloud layer called polar mesospheric clouds in the upper atmosphere, visible in a deep twilight. They are made of crystals of water ice. Noctilucent roughly means night shining in Latin. They are most commonly observed in the summer months at latitudes between 50° and 70° north and south of the equator. They can be observed only when the Sun is below the horizon.
They are the highest clouds in Earth's atmosphere, located in the mesosphere at altitudes of around 76 to 85 kilometres (47 to 53 mi). They are normally too faint to be seen, and are visible only when illuminated by sunlight from below the horizon while the lower layers of the atmosphere are in the Earth's shadow. Noctilucent clouds are not fully understood and are a recently discovered meteorological phenomenon; there is no record of their observation before 1885.
Noctilucent clouds can form only under very restricted conditions; their occurrence can be used as a sensitive guide to changes in the upper atmosphere. They are a relatively recent classification. The occurrence of noctilucent clouds appears to be increasing in frequency, brightness and extent. In 2012 Cumberland's doctoral work in physics supported the possible interpretation of noctilucent clouds as a Miner's Canary for climate change.[1]