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Image: Patrick Emerson
Remember spotting a rainbow as a child and feeling the sudden urge to jump up and down, point and shout: “Look, a rainbow!” Well, the following pictures of semicircular, double or sunset rainbows might make you do just that. In any case, if this were a rainbow beauty pageant, they’d all be perfect tens. So heed this warning that extreme beauty will follow and scroll with care!
A double sunset rainbow in McFall, Missouri, spanning a lone tree:
Image: Carl S.
Silicon Valley is rarely as beautiful as it is with this sunset rainbow:
Image: Steve Jurvetson
The next picture is an absolute favorite that looks like one of those kitschy posters of islands in a soap bubble, only this one is real!
An island in the Maldives spanned by an almost semicircular rainbow:
Image: muha
If that was a favorite, here’s another one:
A perfectly clear primary rainbow, reflected in the water, with a secondary rainbow above as photographed in Kansas:
Image: Patrick Emerson
Time for a little break, perhaps?
According to Merriam-Webster’s dictionay, a rainbow is “an arc or circle that exhibits in concentric bands the colors of the spectrum and that is formed opposite the sun by the refraction and reflection of the sun’s rays in raindrops, spray, or mist.”
Basically, the sun shines onto droplets of moisture in the atmosphere, like rain, mist, dew and spray, and forms a reflection of the sun’s rays. Though rainbows span a continuous spectrum of colours, what we see is a finite sequence, usually according to Newton’s seven identified colours, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. These are often remembered with popular mnemonics like “Richard of Yorke gave battle in vain.”
An illuminated rainbow in Serrieres in the canton of Neuchatel, Switzerland. The picture looks a bit unreal because it was taken with HDR technique:
Image: Tambako the Jaguar
The person in this picture says it all. Caught in the middle of natural beauty, what would you do? And does anyone else strangely feel like yodeling?
A perfect, semicircular rainbow at Alaska’s Wrangell-St. Elias National Park:
Image: Eric Rolph
Somewhere over the rainbow… A rainbow taken from a helicopter:
Image: Mila Zinkova
A picture perfect double rainbow spans the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia:
Image: specialkrb
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