Since we only have one Sun, there is only one antisolar point for the refractions to hit the observer. So we only get those stacked rainbows as the internal refractions separate.
There are a couple of “multiple rainbow” phenomena. One is double rainbows, as you mentioned, along with higher order rainbows. But besides those, there are a few other possibilities.
You can have multiple rainbows if you have multiple light sources. Generally the brightest light source is the sun, and it’s so bright that other light sources are irrelevant. However, reflections of the sun can act as secondary light sources, and you can get bright rainbows from them as well.
Another possibility is that you have raindrops of different shapes, which will can give slightly different rainbows. This is possible if you have a mixture of small (very spherical) and large (slightly pancaked) raindrops.
This is all covered in the wikipedia page on rainbows, if you want to do more reading on the subject.
Yes! If you’re standing next to a tall glass building with the sun shining on it, there is effectively a second image of the sun which acts as a separate light source, and could produce a second rainbow in another direction.
Technically, parallax means your left eye always sees a “different” rainbow than your right, because to reach both eyes simultaneously, two photons must bounce off any given water droplet at slightly different angles and will therefore refract a slightly different part of the spectrum into each eye. So one particular water droplet, examined in isolation, may be refracting pure primary green light into your left eye, but refracting a slightly more yellow tone into your right. Another droplet at the upper edge of the rainbow may be refracting a photon or two of red light into your left eye, but invisible infrared into your right. So theoretically, you’re always seeing “two rainbows”, because rainbows are the sum total of literally billions of tiny little variations in photon paths and hue.
For most observational purposes it’s just one rainbow of course, because the angle change only needs to be miniscule when we observe one at a great distance. But if you stand with the sun directly behind you, you can actually observe the parallax phenomenon by using a garden hose to create a fine mist a few feet in front of your face and look through the colour arc at a finely textured background. If you close one eye and then the other, you will see that the colour bands cover slightly different parts of the background; this is because of the much wider angle of refraction needed to reach both eyes at close range, as opposed to the narrow angle and almost parallel paths the photons must take when you view at a distance of miles/kilometres.
Visual artists call this phenomenon (two different colours appearing to emanate from one single point) “iridescence” and struggle mightily to reproduce a simulacrum of it when painting pearls, shiny feathers, chandeliers, butterfly wings and so on. And of course iridescent tape, which has thousands of embedded microprisms, is often used for security seals because it is so difficult to counterfeit without highly specialized equipment.
A rainbow is a unique experience that involves the sun, water in the sky for it to reflect off of, and your eyes. No one else will see the same rainbow as you. However as there is only one sun and one pair of your eyes, it is not possible to see multiple rainbows at the same time.
Actually, if you want to get technical each of your eyes is seeing a slightly different rainbow and your brain is turning them into one. So maybe it is possible after all (even if not observable by you) 🙂
Yes. You can see multiple rainbows in separate locations at once.
Once you see a regular rainbow, put your hose on a fine mist setting and shoot it at that rainbow. you will see another rainbow much closer to you. That’s one way to do it.
Another? Use some prisms. you can see lots of rainbows at once.
yes you can accomplish this artificially. it will require artificial lights as we only have one sun. but with multiple powerful lights at the right angle and enough mist or rain you can get multiple rainbows.
I have seen it at a night time water fountain show that was putting out a lot of mist with some flood lights.
Driving 95 north in CT, technically heading east, sun on horizon directly behind. There.d been a shower, totally cleared. But tires still kicking up mist caused about half a dozen tiny rainbows between me and the car in front.
If you include halos, which are essentially full circle rainbows you sometimes see as a ring around the sun, then yes. When it’s cold and there are varying layers of ice in the air, they can refract the light differently and cause multiple. Last October we had one here and the sky was half filled with halos, touching side to side like bubbles. I can’t remember what it was called.
Similarly, varying shapes and sizes of water droplets can cause multiple refractions. You can occasionally see multiple when they’re caused by light poking through the clouds in a few places.
Technically everyone sees their own rainbow from their own perspective, even the person standing next to you because the light will refract slightly differently through the droplets. Also there’s someone in another country seeing a rainbow from the same light source, so everyone sees the same rainbow and a different one depending on your judgment criteria.
Rainbows form on the opposite side of the sky from the light source. So if it rains then the sun comes out while the air is still humid you can find the rainbow by looking in the opposite direction of the sun. Which means if this happens close to midday you won’t find a rainbow because the opposite direction of “straight up” would be “under ground”, you only get rainbows in the morning or afternoon, several hours away from midday.
Sort of. Being they are refracted and separated light, if you change positions you are seeing light that has passed through water droplets at different angles, so in a sense every rainbow is unique to the perspective of the viewer from their position regardless of the perceived location of the rainbow.
A few folks mentioned that you can only multiple rainbows from multiple sources. One way that this can happen in real life is with a lake, river, or other body of water. The water surface supplies the mirror. Depending on where you stand and where the water surface is, the rainbows can be strongly separated from each other.
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Since we only have one Sun, there is only one antisolar point for the refractions to hit the observer. So we only get those stacked rainbows as the internal refractions separate.
Good ol’ René Descartes made a nice illustration:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisolar_point#/media/File:Descartes_Rainbow.png
There are a couple of “multiple rainbow” phenomena. One is double rainbows, as you mentioned, along with higher order rainbows. But besides those, there are a few other possibilities.
You can have multiple rainbows if you have multiple light sources. Generally the brightest light source is the sun, and it’s so bright that other light sources are irrelevant. However, reflections of the sun can act as secondary light sources, and you can get bright rainbows from them as well.
Another possibility is that you have raindrops of different shapes, which will can give slightly different rainbows. This is possible if you have a mixture of small (very spherical) and large (slightly pancaked) raindrops.
This is all covered in the wikipedia page on rainbows, if you want to do more reading on the subject.
Yes! If you’re standing next to a tall glass building with the sun shining on it, there is effectively a second image of the sun which acts as a separate light source, and could produce a second rainbow in another direction.
Technically, parallax means your left eye always sees a “different” rainbow than your right, because to reach both eyes simultaneously, two photons must bounce off any given water droplet at slightly different angles and will therefore refract a slightly different part of the spectrum into each eye. So one particular water droplet, examined in isolation, may be refracting pure primary green light into your left eye, but refracting a slightly more yellow tone into your right. Another droplet at the upper edge of the rainbow may be refracting a photon or two of red light into your left eye, but invisible infrared into your right. So theoretically, you’re always seeing “two rainbows”, because rainbows are the sum total of literally billions of tiny little variations in photon paths and hue.
For most observational purposes it’s just one rainbow of course, because the angle change only needs to be miniscule when we observe one at a great distance. But if you stand with the sun directly behind you, you can actually observe the parallax phenomenon by using a garden hose to create a fine mist a few feet in front of your face and look through the colour arc at a finely textured background. If you close one eye and then the other, you will see that the colour bands cover slightly different parts of the background; this is because of the much wider angle of refraction needed to reach both eyes at close range, as opposed to the narrow angle and almost parallel paths the photons must take when you view at a distance of miles/kilometres.
Visual artists call this phenomenon (two different colours appearing to emanate from one single point) “iridescence” and struggle mightily to reproduce a simulacrum of it when painting pearls, shiny feathers, chandeliers, butterfly wings and so on. And of course iridescent tape, which has thousands of embedded microprisms, is often used for security seals because it is so difficult to counterfeit without highly specialized equipment.
A rainbow is a unique experience that involves the sun, water in the sky for it to reflect off of, and your eyes. No one else will see the same rainbow as you. However as there is only one sun and one pair of your eyes, it is not possible to see multiple rainbows at the same time.
Actually, if you want to get technical each of your eyes is seeing a slightly different rainbow and your brain is turning them into one. So maybe it is possible after all (even if not observable by you) 🙂
Yes. You can see multiple rainbows in separate locations at once.
Once you see a regular rainbow, put your hose on a fine mist setting and shoot it at that rainbow. you will see another rainbow much closer to you. That’s one way to do it.
Another? Use some prisms. you can see lots of rainbows at once.
yes you can accomplish this artificially. it will require artificial lights as we only have one sun. but with multiple powerful lights at the right angle and enough mist or rain you can get multiple rainbows.
I have seen it at a night time water fountain show that was putting out a lot of mist with some flood lights.
Driving 95 north in CT, technically heading east, sun on horizon directly behind. There.d been a shower, totally cleared. But tires still kicking up mist caused about half a dozen tiny rainbows between me and the car in front.
If you include halos, which are essentially full circle rainbows you sometimes see as a ring around the sun, then yes. When it’s cold and there are varying layers of ice in the air, they can refract the light differently and cause multiple. Last October we had one here and the sky was half filled with halos, touching side to side like bubbles. I can’t remember what it was called.
Similarly, varying shapes and sizes of water droplets can cause multiple refractions. You can occasionally see multiple when they’re caused by light poking through the clouds in a few places.
Technically everyone sees their own rainbow from their own perspective, even the person standing next to you because the light will refract slightly differently through the droplets. Also there’s someone in another country seeing a rainbow from the same light source, so everyone sees the same rainbow and a different one depending on your judgment criteria.
Rainbows form on the opposite side of the sky from the light source. So if it rains then the sun comes out while the air is still humid you can find the rainbow by looking in the opposite direction of the sun. Which means if this happens close to midday you won’t find a rainbow because the opposite direction of “straight up” would be “under ground”, you only get rainbows in the morning or afternoon, several hours away from midday.
Sort of. Being they are refracted and separated light, if you change positions you are seeing light that has passed through water droplets at different angles, so in a sense every rainbow is unique to the perspective of the viewer from their position regardless of the perceived location of the rainbow.
A few folks mentioned that you can only multiple rainbows from multiple sources. One way that this can happen in real life is with a lake, river, or other body of water. The water surface supplies the mirror. Depending on where you stand and where the water surface is, the rainbows can be strongly separated from each other.
The image links are decaying, but here’s an article about a quadruple rainbow that someone experienced as a result of just such a reflection: https://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/the-story-behind-that-quadruple-rainbow.html
https://slate.com/technology/2015/04/quadruple-rainbow-viral-picture-is-real.html
No.
There is only one rainbow in the entire universe. It moves as it will throughout the universe, there is no telling where or when it may show up.
There has only ever been one rainbow since the dawn of time.