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Home Other GeoPicture

GeoPicture of the Week: Complete double rainbow encircles Australian town

Mihai Andrei by Mihai Andrei
October 22, 2014
in GeoPicture
Reading Time: 1 min read
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For our GeoPicture of the Week, we’ve gotten used to pictures of minerals, fossils or geological phenomena – but today, I want to show you something different: a stunning, complete, double rainbow:

C. LEONHARDT/BIRDSEYE VIEW PHOTOGRAPHY

The picture was taken from a helicopter flying over Cottesloe Beach in Western Australia. Rainbows appear because water droplets act like prisms, separating visible light into its constituent spectral colors – the colors of the rainbow. When the bands of color reach the far end of the drop, they bounce back toward the sun; people with their backs turned on the sun can see the rainbow – or more likely, half of it.

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All rainbows are round, but we almost never see it. Seeing a full circle requires a viewing area with plenty of droplets in all directions, like for example when you are flying, like in this picture.

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The second, dimmer rainbow appears when light bounces two times in the water droplets before coming back. For this reason, it is much dimmer than the first one.

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Mihai Andrei

Mihai Andrei

Andrei's background is in geophysics, and he's been fascinated by it ever since he was a child. Feeling that there is a gap between scientists and the general audience, he started ZME Science -- and the results are what you see today.

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