What Do You Know About The Rainbow?

A rainbow is arc shaped structure, which consist of different colored bands that appear on one part of sky for short span of time. For rainbow to form there is requirement that, rain must be falling in one part of sky and sun must be shining behind the observer. Rainbow from when sunlight falls on raindrop and different wavelength of visible light, which represent different colors, begin to form on the sky.

It is a rule that violet light bend that most and red color bend least way. Most of the light passes through the rain drop. Because of bending of colors in different ways and on different angle each color that emerges from raindrop produce a spectrum of colors. As only single color from each drop reaches to observer, so there are number of raindrops from which each rain drop reflect the light back to an observer at slightly different angle, as to produce different primary colors of rainbow. Secondary rainbow appears above the primary rainbow. When two colors reflection occur inside a raindrop at such angle that it results into secondary rainbow. When weaker light that start emerging to produce a dimmer rainbow effect.

An arc of coloured light in the sky caused by refraction of the sun's rays by rain is known as the rainbow. Rainbows take so many forms; Multiple bows, bows that cross, red bows, twinned bows, coloured fringes, dark bands, spokes and more are its types. One of the most charming examples of the chromatic dispersion is a rainbow. When the white sunlight is intercepted by a drop of water in the atmosphere, some of the light refracts into the drop, reflects from the inner surface of drop, and then refracts out of the drop.

As with the prism, the first refraction separates the sunlight into its component colours, and the second refraction increases separation. So, the result is the rainbow. Rainbows are simply caused by the splitting of white sunlight into it component colours by raindrops. Some of the light that falls on a water drop enters into the drop. As it enters into the drop, the light is bent or refracted and then split into a rainbow of so many colours.

This is because of that each colour of light gets bent by a slightly different amount. The different colours then reflect off the back of drop, and when they pass through front of the drop again, they are bent or refracted still some more. A rainbow is always directly opposite the sun from observer. This clearly explains that why rainbows are only seen when the sun is low in the sky, usually in the late afternoon.