- “Rainbow” comes from the Latin arcus pluvius, meaning “rainy arch.”
- The Greeks associated rainbows with the goddess Iris - they said she created them as a path linking us to the immortals. Even today, some of that mythology survives as "crossing the rainbow bridge," a euphemism for death, especially the deaths of animals. Iris also lent her name to the Iris flower, the iris in your eye, the chemical iridium, and the word “iridescent.”
- There are seven colours in a rainbow, right? Well, maybe. How many colours you see depends on your culture (in particular the number of words for colours in your language) and how good your eyes are at distinguishing colours. In the western world we tend to see seven, thanks to Isaac Newton, although Newton himself originally only saw five - Red, Yellow, Green, Blue and violet. He added Orange and indigo later so that the spectrum would have seven colours to match the number of notes in a musical scale, the days of the week and the number of known objects in the Solar System at the time. The Greek poet Homer thought rainbows were made up of just one colour - Purple. The philosophers Aristotle and Xenophanes argued for three colours - purple, yellow-green, and red. During the Renaissance, they settled on four - red, blue, green, and yellow. In actual fact, each colour blends into the next, so you could argue that a rainbow contains hundreds of hues. Chances are you've been taught there are seven colours, and the way to remember the order they come in: "Richard of York Gave Battle In Vain."
- If you see a rainbow and point it out to a friend, you'll both be seeing a different rainbow. In fact, each of your eyes sees a different rainbow as well. No two people are seeing the same rainbow because they are created from reflection of light on water droplets at an angle of 42 degrees from the direction opposite the light source. A rainbow is not a physical object that can be approached or touched, but it isn't strictly speaking an illusion either, because you can take photographs of them. Rainbows are like holograms. Each drop of rain creates a tiny rainbow of its own while contributing to the larger one.
- A rainbow is always a full circle of light. We see them as arcs when standing on the ground, which is more often than not where you'll be when you see one. However, if you're in an aeroplane or on top of an extremely tall building, looking down on one, you'll see a full circle.
- Sometimes, light reflects off droplets more than once, and that's when you get a double rainbow. The colours are reversed in the second one, and there is a darker band of sky between them. The dark band actually has a name - Alexander's band, after Alexander of Aphrodisias who first described it in 200 AD. You may also have noticed that the sky under a rainbow is brighter than the sky above it. This is to do with how the light reflects off the raindrops to your eyes. Raindrops are falling throughout the sky, but only at the 42 degree angle do they produce the colours. Below that, they are reflecting White light, which makes the sky look brighter; above that, the light is reflected, but misses our eyes, so it appears darker. While triple and quadruple rainbows are possible, they are rarely seen - one study claimed that in 250 years of research only four had been reliably spotted, and none of those people had a camera with them to record the event.
- Rainbows aren't only produced by sun and rain. The light of the Moon can produce a "moonbow" which is the same phenomenon - a moonbow appears white because the human eye cannot see colours as well in the dark. The colours are still there, but are too faint for our eyes to see. Fogbows are much broader than a rainbow, with very faint colours.
- The world’s longest-lasting (or longest-observed, anyway) rainbow was seen over Sheffield, England on March 14, 1994 – it lasted from 9am to 3pm. The place in the world which is generally believed to get the most rainbows is the US state of Hawaii.
- Scientists think there may be rainbows on Saturn's moon Titan, as it has a wet surface and humid clouds. These exotic rainbows would differ from those on our planet because they would be seen at an angle of 49 degrees, not 42, and many of them would be infrared rainbows, which would require night goggles in order to see them.
- So what about this pot of Gold, then? It's a common myth that the end of the rainbow is where the Leprechauns keep their gold. Of course, because a rainbow is an optical phenomenon that cannot be approached, it is impossible to ever reach it, even in the case of that Sheffield rainbow. This myth didn't originate with leprechauns, though. The myth originated in Silesia, a region of old Eastern Europe. People there believed the angels put the gold there, and it could only be retrieved by a naked man who could run fast enough to get there before the rainbow faded away. A lesser known, related myth is that if a person passes underneath a rainbow they will change from a man to a woman, or vice versa.
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