Sister wonders, “Why is the sky blue.”  Does every child ask this question at some point?  We found the answer at here and then drew our own diagram to help us understand.  Pretty, huh?

Brother did some discovering of his own last night.  I had just come in from turning off the Christmas lights when I saw the last half of Brother’s fall off the couch and heard his sad, “Hurt me! hurt me!”  Will turned around from the computer to check for bruises and ask, “Are you okay.”  To which Brother replied, “Ow, foot.” then a completely dissappointed, “Can’t fly.”  He seemed very much surprised at the result of his jump as if he had expected to take off across the living room.

Original by Philip Gibbs May 1997.

Why is the sky blue?

A clear cloudless day-time sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter red light.  When we look towards the sun at sunset, we see red and orange colours because the blue light has been scattered out and away from the line of sight.

The white light from the sun is a mixture of all colours of the rainbow.  This was demonstrated by Isaac Newton, who used a prism to separate the different colours and so form a spectrum.