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rainbows at night

EvieEvening23

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I love how there's still a rainbow in the background even when it's night and there are no apparent water sources in close relativity to the head fruit tree.

What are your opinions on this miracle of nature?
 
Anything is possible with the blood of freshly decapitated anthropomorphic animal neighbors.
 
Rainbows at night are best rainbows.
 
Tbh being a big physics fan, the idea that a rainbow could exist without a light source with which the water particles can refract light from really bothers me.

But it's p cool, I love rainbows so I won't complain too much.
 
Looks great any time of day
I happened to see it with the sunrise background and it was amazing
 
If I have to provide a scientific and logical explanation to this, well, it was because of

CiW0qbI.gif


I agree with Zane though, one time I saw it against sunrise background and it was perfect *_* Wish I can keep sunrise bg all the time.
 
Tbh being a big physics fan, the idea that a rainbow could exist without a light source with which the water particles can refract light from really bothers me.

But it's p cool, I love rainbows so I won't complain too much.

All of the light needed comes from the mobile phones, laptops, and tablets of the users viewing the site...

and the water particles come from the vast lake of user tears pooled behind the forum tree after every limited restock of the shop...
 
No no no! This should not be a thing!

When sunlight encounters a raindrop, part of the light is reflected and the rest enters the raindrop. The light is refracted at the surface of the raindrop. When this light hits the back of the raindrop, some of it is reflected off the back. When the internally reflected light reaches the surface again, once more some is internally reflected and some is refracted as it exits the drop. (The light that reflects off the drop, exits from the back, or continues to bounce around inside the drop after the second encounter with the surface, is not relevant to the formation of the primary rainbow.) The overall effect is that part of the incoming light is reflected back over the range of 0? to 42?, with the most intense light at 42?.[18] This angle is independent of the size of the drop, but does depend on its refractive index. Seawater has a higher refractive index than rain water, so the radius of a "rainbow" in sea spray is smaller than a true rainbow. This is visible to the naked eye by a misalignment of these bows.

The reason the returning light is most intense at about 42? is that this is a turning point ? light hitting the outermost ring of the drop gets returned at less than 42?, as does the light hitting the drop nearer to its centre. There is a circular band of light that all gets returned right around 42?. If the sun were a laser emitting parallel, monochromatic rays, then the luminance (brightness) of the bow would tend toward infinity at this angle (ignoring interference effects). (See Caustic (optics).) But since the sun's luminance is finite and its rays are not all parallel (it covers about half a degree of the sky) the luminance does not go to infinity. Furthermore, the amount by which light is refracted depends upon its wavelength, and hence its colour. This effect is called dispersion. Blue light (shorter wavelength) is refracted at a greater angle than red light, but due to the reflection of light rays from the back of the droplet, the blue light emerges from the droplet at a smaller angle to the original incident white light ray than the red light. Due to this angle, blue is seen on the inside of the arc of the primary rainbow, and red on the outside. The result of this is not only to give different colours to different parts of the rainbow, but also to diminish the brightness. (A "rainbow" formed by droplets of a liquid with no dispersion would be white, but brighter than a normal rainbow.)

The light at the back of the raindrop does not undergo total internal reflection, and some light does emerge from the back. However, light coming out the back of the raindrop does not create a rainbow between the observer and the sun because spectra emitted from the back of the raindrop do not have a maximum of intensity, as the other visible rainbows do, and thus the colours blend together rather than forming a rainbow.
A rainbow does not exist at one particular location. Many rainbows exist; however, only one can be seen depending on the particular observer's viewpoint as droplets of light illuminated by the sun. All raindrops refract and reflect the sunlight in the same way, but only the light from some raindrops reaches the observer's eye. This light is what constitutes the rainbow for that observer. The whole system composed by the sun's rays, the observer's head, and the (spherical) water drops has an axial symmetry around the axis through the observer's head and parallel to the sun's rays. The rainbow is curved because the set of all the raindrops that have the right angle between the observer, the drop, and the sun, lie on a cone pointing at the sun with the observer at the tip. The base of the cone forms a circle at an angle of 40?42? to the line between the observer's head and their shadow but 50% or more of the circle is below the horizon, unless the observer is sufficiently far above the earth's surface to see it all, for example in an airplane or a high place.

Moonlight however is not strong enough to create a rainbow visible to the human eye. Since it doesn't "excite" our cone receptors enough, we can't really make out the colors therefore we see them as white. Moonbows are rather rare because there are several conditions that must come into play:
The moon must be at its brightest phase and must be low in the sky (around 42? elev.) but the sky must be dark. This part can be hard to get because the sky isn't usually dark during a rising/setting full moon. It must be raining OPPOSITE the moon.

The rainbow we're seeing right now on TBT at NIGHT is very unrealistic since its not raining and most moonbows are white.

Thanks for reading my rather long physics rant.
 
It would be a nicer rant if like 80% of it wasn't copy pasted from the Rainbow wikipedia page...

I'll let it slide this time for the sake of the joke and since you're new here, but for the future and the record, we would typically give out a warning for that as it's considered spam and oftentimes used as cheating to earn forum bells. :p
 
how can rainbows be real if our eyes aren't real
 
how can rainbows be real if our eyes aren't real

your eyes may be real, but the rainbows aren't
none of this is real
the universe is a hologram
everything you know is wrong
this is all just a big dream
wake up
 
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