Difference between revisions of "Talk:Rainbow"

Revision as of 19:25, March 15, 2007

Rainbow = circle?

How can a rainbow be a circle? Can you provide any satellite pictures that can support this claim? Grinder 21:31, 12 March 2007 (EDT)

Visit Niagara Falls. When you are standing in (say) Victoria Park on the Canadian side on sunset, you up at the top of the falls, looking into a wall of mist that extends above and below you, and you see a whole circular rainbow in it. It's incredible. You can get calendars and postcards with pictures of circular rainbows in the souvenir shops.

Rainbows are huge circles around the "antisolar point." In late afternoon, the sun is behind you and above you, so if the "projection screen" of droplets only extends down to the ground, you only see less than half of a circle. To see a whole circle, you need to have a "screen" of droplets that extends above and below you.

From an airplane, if you're above cirrus clouds, you can often see much smaller rainbow-like auras surrounding the shadow of the airplane. In a novel called The War Lover by John Hersey, a bomber pilot flying in formation points out to his crew that there is an aura surrounding the shadow of their plane, but not any of the others. Of course, the crew in each of the other planes would have seen the aura appearing around the shadow of their own plane. Dpbsmith 15:25, 15 March 2007 (EDT)

Hey Grinder, here are some pics: Circular Rainbows Jrssr5 15:50, 13 March 2007 (EDT)

"it has difficulty explaining why they seem beautiful and evoke such feelings of awe and mystery." ... has science ever tried to explain this? It comes off like a cheap dig.--Dave3172 12:08, 15 March 2007 (EDT)

How would you like to phrase it? I was trying for some compromise between various possibilities that occurred to me. I didn't want to say that science cannot explain the appearance of rainbows, because it can. But I didn't want to give the impression that science explains away rainbows. But it is possible that an evolutionist could hypothesis some adaptive advantage to perceiving beauty, so...

Ah, got it. Physics cannot explain...

If we just want to say rainbows are beautiful and awe-inspiring that's also fine, and if anyone want to slap a {{fact}} tag on it there shouldn't be much of a problem finding a source citation... like... hmmmm.... yeah, of course: Wordsworth, "My heart leaps up when I behold/A rainbow in the sky:/So was it when my life began;/So is it now I am a man;/So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die!" I'll try making that change and see what people think. Dpbsmith 15:01, 15 March 2007 (EDT)