Hate to be a wet blanket, but that looks like a cloud to me. Psychologists call it
pareidolia. I’ve seen a whale in the Microsoft default wallpaper (the cloudy one) and a mermaid in the blisters formed by rain on an old wall…
I agree.
I wouldn’t presume to be a well-traveled person, and I’m certainly not well-traveled by way of frequent flying, but on the rare occasions when I was up in a plane I observed the clouds around me very keenly. I was very struck by their three dimensionality, by how there could be walls, floors, clouds that were above, behind, below, wrapped around, or pretty much any other prepositional relation you care to name with respect to each other. The same phenomenon presents itself to astronauts looking down at the earth from space. They are amazed by the three dimensionality of the clouds, even though the clouds are roughly 180 or 190 miles below.
Clouds can range from the ground level, to the top of the
troposphere, and some forms can even be up in the stratosphere, which can mean as high as 12 miles up (and some
noctilucent clouds are even higher than that - 30 to 54 miles!!!
).
We ground dwellers (which is what I really count myself as) are often unaware of the three dimensionality of clouds, not being able travel up and down through them. What I am really saying here is that there is plenty of opportunity for clouds of all sizes to be in front of one another and to be separated by great airy distances.
My take on the “angel” photo, or cloud photo, is that it is a cloud whose mode of formation, while somewhat baffling, is nevertheless not in any way supernatural. It is a very isolated, small, wispy cloud, so from that standpoint it is unusual, but not supernatural.
Why is it there? I haven’t the
foggiest idea . . .
