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Asked by langl045 to Wei, Simon, Rebecca on 23 Jun 2011.
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Wei Xun answered on 23 Jun 2011:
Hello!
The colours of the sky that we see are a result of sunlight (which is whitish) scattering inside the atomsphere into the colour of the rainbow by the Earth’s atomsphere.
Since when the sun is strong, the blue light is scattered the most, so the sky appears blue; but at sunset and sunrise, the light is weaker and travelling at a lower angle, so the slower red and orange light can be seen around the sky-line. Also, the particles that hang in the air above you can also affect its colour, so sometimes you can get a beautiful pink and orange sunset over cities from the air pollution (sorry to ruin it for you!). You can find a better explaination here: http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/blue-sky/en/
Clouds basically reflect the light from the sky, they are normally white since they scatter more than one wavelength of light which combine again to form a white colour, when there’s a storm the clouds can get very thick and cast a shadow on themselves and those around them, so look dark and grey.
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Rebecca Handley answered on 23 Jun 2011:
Hey! Wei’s pretty much covered this one! Air is blue, the sky appears blue because your looking through lots of air. The same reason a cup of water looks clear, but the sea looks blue… because its deeper! The blue colour comes from the scattering of light, the colours of everything we see are determined by what colour of light they reflect.
Heres a good website for why they appear to change colour: http://www.sciencemadesimple.com/sky_blue.html 🙂
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