Clouds are incredible things.
They fly through the air with the greatest of ease... just like trapeze artists.
And they sometimes fall down, hitting the ground and turning into a mist... just like trapeze artists!

But that's where any similarities end. At least until trapeze artists transform into water vapour - which is unlikely, of course, since the safety net companies would be put out of business.

Did you know there are more than twenty different types of cloud? I don't know them all - they all have fancy Latin names: Nicobobinus, Stradivarius and Hydrocephalus... better known to the common man as rain clouds, wispy clouds and cotton wool clouds.

Because they're so high up, it can be difficult to measure a cloud's height. Indeed, until very recently, scientists had to fly through them, in a plane with a massive ruler bolted to the roof.
Now, however, they use lasers for measurement - by projecting a point onto the top of a cloud, and counting how long it takes to appear, the height of that point can be calculated.

And amazingly, this is exactly the method I used to discover the tallest cloud!

Borrowing a laser pointer, I shone it at the biggest cloud in the sky. Imagine my surprise when the point appeared... 3 seconds later!
Multiplying this by the speed of light, and converting it into miles, the cloud turned out to be an incredible 558,847 miles high!

WOW!