What exactly is a rainbow?
We can explain the phenomenon but cannot reveal the location of the pot of gold.
Photo: Randy Son Of Robert/Flickr
See, rainbows are what happen when
the sun’s light is refracted through raindrops in the Earth’s
atmosphere. The sun’s light looks white to us, but when it passes
through raindrops, the raindrop bends the different colors in the light
so that they spread out. These colors are reflected back to us as a
rainbow.
That’s the simple explanation (or the only one I dare to attempt).
Three things have to happen in order for a rainbow to appear:
First, it has to be raining. Second, it also has to be sunny. And third,
you have to be between the sun and the rain to see the rainbow.
Rainbows often appear after a brief thunderstorm when the sun is low in
the sky.
Have you heard about the
proverbial pot of gold at the end of a rainbow? Well, since a rainbow
is really just an optical illusion, you can never find the end of it
— as you move, so does the rainbow.
Another interesting tidbit about rainbows? They are actually full circles
and not semicircles. We just can’t see the full circle because we can
see only as far the horizon from our vantage point on the ground.
Airplane pilots have reported seeing full-circle rainbows, since from
their viewpoint in an airplane’s cockpit, they get a pretty expansive
view of both the sky and the ground.
So why don’t you see them anymore? Rainbows seem uncommon these
days, but probably because we’re moving too fast to notice them. That
has a lot to do with how we spend our time now that we’re adults (we’re
not exactly spending hours outside playing in the yard). We’re also
probably too busy wrapped up in technology to stop and notice them.
Rainbows have long been a weighty symbol, whether it be symbolizing
the new era of hope after the flood in the Bible or symbolizing gay
pride today. But for our purposes, let’s just say that a rainbow is just
that, a bow created from rain, a way for us to remember to pause from
the din of our busy lives and enjoy the beauty of the world around us.
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