Supernumerary rainbows
by Konstantinos Kourtidis, Demokritus University of Thrace, Xanthi, Greece
A supernumerary rainbow is rather rare. It consists of several (in this image three) faint rainbows on the inner side of the primary rainbow. Supernumerary rainbows are slightly detached and have pastel colour bands that do not fit the usual pattern.
The faint rainbows are caused by interference between rays of light following slightly different paths with slightly varying lengths within the raindrops. Some rays are in phase, reinforcing each other through constructive interference, creating a bright band; others are out of phase by up to half a wavelength, cancelling each other out through destructive interference, and creating a gap.
The supernumeraries are more clearly visible when only the RED band of the original image is displayed; the RED-only of this image can be viewed at http://imaggeo.egu.eu/view/2599/ .
Category
Location
- Europe (3777)
- Southern Europe (1626)
- Greece (312)
- Exact location (24.9906 E, 40.9451 N)
Tags
Colour
Image properties
4608 × 3456 px;
image/jpeg; 5.0 MB
Camera:
Nikon COOLPIX P510
Taken on 17
August
2014
Submitted on 2 September 2014
Licence
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)
Credit
Konstantinos Kourtidis (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)
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