Yesterday while driving home from work, I saw a gorgeous rainbow in the sky. I could see the whole thing from end to end, and down closer to the ground on both sides it was very bright and clear. I loved it! It stayed in my view for several miles even, since I was driving towards it. (My 2 year old daughter said “Are we chasing it?”)
All of the sudden, I noticed a second very faint rainbow a little out from the first. I noticed it looked different, so I started really looking at it. It was much fainter, and I could only see a little bit at the bottom. It was wider than the other rainbow, and here is the weird part – it was reversed! The red was on the bottom working up to the purple on top. Does anyone know what it would do this mirror image type of thing?
A couple weeks ago, during a morning sunshower in Oregon, I saw a rainbow with 3 additional supernumerary arcs.
I didn’t know they could have that many.
Wow! Thanks. I had never heard of the colors being reversed like that. I’ve seen double rainbows before, but I guess I’ve never noticed the colors. I even called a friend of mine who is into science-y things, and she hadn’t heard of it. Thanks!
Another interesting feature about primary and secondary rainbows – the space between them is darker than the surrounding sky. If you see the rainbows against a dark background (dark clouds, or a mountain) this can be very dramatic.
This was first remarked upon by Alexander of Aphrodisias betwen 100-200 AD, and is known as “Alexander’s Dark Band”
No joke, although you can try your hand at a joke about “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”. Everybody does.
In addition to Secondary rainbows, there are Tertiary, Quarternary, etc. rainbows. They are essentially never seenn in nature, because a.) They’re pretty weak and b.) they’re nowhere near the primary and secondary rainbows – they’re pretty close to the sun. The first tertiary rainbow to be observed was probably the one created in a laboratory by al Farisi and al Shirazi in Persia circa 1400.
Jearl D. Walker once published a paper in the American Journal of Physics that showed a “Rainbow Rose” with something like the first 20 orders of rainbows, along with the order of the colors and their widths It was printed in color, of course, which is pretty rare for AJP. There’s no way you’d see most of these in nature, or even the laboratory 9without really working at it), but it’s cool nonetheless.