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The magical nanny Mary Poppins, created by author P L Travers, is known for flying across the sky with her enchanted umbrella. In the 1964 Disney film adaptation of Travers’s story, she even sat on a cloud or two, and Susan Talbot seems to have spotted Mary Poppins’s umbrella left sticking out the top of a Cumulus. But this isn’t a magic umbrella at all; it’s a horseshoe. The horseshoe-vortex cloud develops inside a spinning vortex of air formed as a thermal updraft encounters brisk crosswinds overhead, and it’s almost as rare a sight as a flying nanny.Horseshoe vortex accompanying a Cumulus cloud spotted over Distelberg, Austria by Susan Talbot.