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Since then, she has performed in musicals and has worked as a composer, producer, and television commentator. She attended the University of Portland’s School of Dramatic Arts and Music.

As the droplets get larger, gravity distorts their shape and the rainbow vanishes.Brittney Ryan is an American author who was born in Portland, Oregon. This happens for very small droplets, such as a fine mist, or just after a rain shower when the air is just moist. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.įor rainbows to form, the shape of the water droplets has to be very close to a sphere for all of them to bend and reflect the colors in harmony. The droplets that send the colors to your eye cannot send them to anyone else, so even though everyone near you sees the same rainbow at a distance, each person really sees their own slightly different rainbow. And, voila, you have your own personal rainbow. From there, the colors can bend out again into air and reach your eye.The United Kingdom’s Meteorology Office explains how light refracts, or bends, in a water droplet or a prism.Īs you look at these droplets, the different colors happen to bunch up at a slightly different angle, and each color forms the circular rim of a cone with your eye at the tip of the cone. When the colors hit the back wall of the water droplet, the angle is now too shallow for them to bend out into the air, so they reflect back into the water droplet and return to its entrance wall. Scientists call the bending of light “refracting.” The colors separate because each “color” of light travels with a different speed in water, or, for that matter, any transparent material that light can travel through, like glass in a prism. Rainbows form when sunlight from behind you hits millions of tiny round water droplets in front of you and bounces back to your eyes.Īs a sunbeam hits a droplet at an angle, it bends into the water and separates out into a spectrum of colors. I am a physicist, and I’ll explain how to do that in a minute. To see the full circle, however, you will have to be in an airplane, literally above the clouds.

But if you are standing on a mountain where you can see both above and below you, and the sun is behind you and it is misty or has just rained, chances are good that you will see more of the rainbow’s circle. Normally, when you look at a rainbow, the Earth’s horizon in front of you hides the bottom half of the circle.

Most us go through life seeing rainbows only as arches of color in the sky, but that’s only half of what is really a circle of color. But is there really an “end” to a rainbow, and can we ever get to it? ( The Conversation) – The legend goes that there is a pot of gold hidden at the end of every rainbow.