Lucinda Blum, age 8, of Staten Island, New York, for her question:

What makes clouds turn different colors?

The clouds borrow their colors from the sunbeams. An ordinary sunbeam seems to have no color at all and we cannot really see it. But actually it is made from all the colors of the rainbow. We cannot see them because they are woven and blended together. But there are certain things that separate the hidden colors of the sunbeams. t ,,Je see them when the morning and evening clouds blush with pink and red and adorn the sky with patches of flaming orange, palest green and deep purple.

To do this, the sunbeams need fine gaseous particles in the air and the clouds. These fine fragments bend some of their colored threads and scatter them around the sky. Some of them shine on the clouds for us to see. The pretty colors come in the evening and early morning, when the sun is low in the sky. This is when its sunbeams slant down long long paths through the air. There are more fine fragments to split off the rainbow colors and shine them on the clouds.