Double rainbows

Storms with heavy rain moved through parts of Mid-Missouri Wednesday afternoon with skies clearing quickly behind the storms. This allowed the sunlight to go through water droplets, forming a beautiful double rainbow.

Rainbows can be seen when you have your back to the sun and the rain is ahead of you. Light from the sun goes through the droplets and is refracted (bent) and then strikes the inside wall of the drop. As the light reflects back out of the raindrop, it bends again.

This reflection produces the arc of sunlight spread out across it’s spectrum of colors of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet which is what we see as a rainbow.

However, sometimes there are two reflections inside a raindrop which causes a secondary bow to form which tends to be fainter than the primary bow and displays the colors in reverse order from the primary bow.

The best time to see a rainbow is in the early morning or late afternoon, when the sun is lower in the sky.