Wednesday, April 5

Today, my Facebook newsfeed was full of pictures of rainbows! I have decided that since rainbows are natural and are related to weather, I wanted to research what caused them. I attempted to take a picture of the rainbow myself, but my photography skills failed me today so I borrowed a photo taken by my friend, Miranda, that she posted on her facebook.

Paraphrased from HowStuffWorks:
Rainbows are created when light enters through one side of a raindrop in the air, is reflected on the other, and then leaves the drop. The raindrop acts as a prism and breaks up the light into a spectrum of colors.

My facebook friends also expressed their wonder at a double rainbow (thanks, I'm sure, to this lovely video). A double rainbow is created when the raindrops in the sky are a certain size that allows them to create two reflections internally. The fact that raindrops have to be a particular size is the reason why double rainbows are more rare than single rainbows.