The Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies – a joint effort between UW-Madison, NOAA and NASA – runs a blog featuring posts of weather-related satellite imagery. The posts often include beefy animated images of things like volcanoes in the West Indies and potential vorticity anomalies on the California coast.

Luckily, the institute’s Wisconsin bias sometimes shows through and they offer up cool Great Lakes scenes. In December, they put together this mesmerizing shot of cloud bands streaming over Lake Superior.

Be sure to let the whole image load and start looping, which could take a few minutes. I’m no weather geek, but this thing has me mesmerized like a meteorological lava lamp.

But then again, I’ve also lost plenty of time to YouTube videos of taffy pullers.