[MarkGreen]

So pretty! []
I love'em :]

[lyner]

Longing for the day that you get to see it for yourself Be nice if it was on your boat on the ocean changing the water into all the colours of the rainbow. If my wife and I hadn't seen it we would also still believe it was impossible. But there ya go.

A rainbow is a well defined phenomenon. What you see is the result of light being internally reflected and dispersed inside water drops. It is a virtual image. The angle subtended by the bow is about 42 degrees from a line through your head from the Sun; it's a cone. That is what an actual rainbow is.

If you want to suggest that, suddenly, light behaved differently for you then I have to doubt you.
You may have seen another phenomenon or even misinterpreted what you saw. There are many other ways of producing a very pretty and striking optical spectrum but they are not rainbows.
Did you want Science to have been suspended, temporarily, for your experience or do you want a scientific explanation for what you saw?

[Andrew K Fletcher (OP)]

My wife and I saw a huge rainbow. 1 end of which was close by and was not moving aways as anticipated. we drove closer and eventually right through it at a snails pace. While within the very bright area, the road was coloured and there appeared to be a full spectrum of colours.

Miss interpreted what we saw? Kidding right? Might not have been a rainbow? Bahhhh Humbug

[lyner]

The problem is: do you have an alternative explanation for how a rainbow is formed? This question strikes me as very relevant.
I could suggest that the spectrum you saw was formed, perhaps, on your windscreen. Did you get our of the car? Could you draw a diagram of the actual situation, including the Sun's direction?
Should I believe YOU or the evidence of my own frequent optical experiments and the eminent logic of the tried (and tested)  description of rainbow formation?
Rainbows behave like rainbows - except for akf??? I don't think so..

[Cris12]

Hi. I'm from Hawaii and I'd like to say that I'm glad I found this message board discussing passing through a rainbow. I was recently at Discover.com message board where someone asked if it was possible to pass through a rainbow and most of the posters there discounted it saying that it was an impossibility. I did post something but now the link to that site has been replaced. Anyway, I want to add that I've also experienced passing through a rainbow twice. The first one was the most vivid. It was just an amazing experience seeing all the colors around me. I was driving downhill at that time and there was another car in front of me that passed through it first. The second time I experienced it was on the freeway. I know another person personally who claimed he has experienced it. So there, add me to the few (maybe many?)who have passed through a rainbow.

[lyner]

It would appear that all the people who claim to have been at / near the end of a rainbow have been in cars. Does anyone actually claim to have walked to the end?
You see, for this to be the case, we should have to seriously rethink all of classical optics and question the operation of mirrors, lenses and prisms. Basically, none of these would operate in a predictable way.  Is there any evidence of this?

[elmejor]

yup! great pictures, well i dont think it is possible to reach the end of the rainbows as they are circular shaped!

[Andrew K Fletcher (OP)]

We need to rethink what is happening here. There will undoubtedly be many more people who have walked through the end of a rainbow, just as all the people who were on foot were walking through the end of the rainbow we saw in Preston, Devon. From the car we could see the colours bathing the people and the road ahead of us, just as reported in the quote below, except we were in a car. And if you tink about it, vehicles travel grater distances than people on foot so are more likely to encounter this phenomenon.


http://forums.mokata.net/ar/t6327.htm

Code: [Select]

mole - February 29, 2008 01:29 AM (GMT)
I was standing out side my villa the other day after a sexy thunderstorm had gone through the mountains, I noticed there was a rainbow there.

I walked under it and I changed all different colours while walking through it.

[Andrew K Fletcher (OP)]

http://www.rainbowmaker.us/frcq.htm  Firemen spray water and make a huge rainbow that people walk though on youtube.

[lyner]

http://www.rainbowmaker.us/frcq.htm  Firemen spray water and make a huge rainbow that people walk though on youtube.

There is nothing wrong with  the idea of someone walking through 'your' rainbow.  You see a rainbow which appears to hit the ground some way in front of you and other people can be seen / filmed walking around / through it. That is not the same as walking through your own bow.
The rainbow is nowhere in particular; it is a virtual image of the Sun, formed by each of the water droplets where you can see it and at a particular angle (same goes for the secondary rainbow, too). You might just as well state that you could walk through a mirror into the image of the room that you see 'behind it'. The room isn't there any more than the rainbow is ' there. They are both virtual images.
If you don't go along with that idea then you are denying the laws of optics and can't expect a mirror, lens or reflex camera to work reliably.

If, yet again, you want to explain a well established phenomenon in some special terms of your own then that is your privilege but, if your explanation does not extend to and explain all other phenomena, it is clearly lacking validity and you can't expect it to be accepted.

[lyner]

http://www.rainbowmaker.us/frcq.htm  Firemen spray water and make a huge rainbow that people walk though on youtube.

If you actually look at the pictures you will see that the rainbow is circular - symmetrical and each leg appears the same distance away (because the ground is more or less level and it's all green grass). You will also see the people walking around the field, in front of, in and behind the apparent rainbow, which terminates in an indeterminate region somewhere on the ground. Some of the people in shot are actually waving their arms, pointing at and describing the rainbow which they can see which is nowhere near the rainbow that the camera sees - it is their own, personal rainbow.

Have you noticed that a rainbow actually appears 'upside down'/ inside out. Blue light is refracted more than red light but the red band is towards the centre and the blue band is towards the inside. That is because the blue light that you see has come from raindrops which are further out. If the rainbow were a real 'projected' image, the blue band would be on the inside and the red band on the outside.

Someone else could be seeing red light from the same raindrop from which you are getting blue light.

[Andrew K Fletcher (OP)]

Got it Sophie, thanks. The colours on the floor we drove through were part of the circle of the rainbow and therefore could never be the end of the rainbow. But for us, we will remember it as the end of the rainbow if thats ok with you

[Jimmy Science]

Yes is possible, it's easy to replicate what happened when you were driving.  More than likely the cars in front of you were creating fine water droplets that extended the end of the rainbow on the horizon to a few feet in front of you.  I've recreated this on many occasions when there was a good rainbow using a hosepipe set to fine spray.  You need to get the positioning right but what you are actually doing is creating the conditions for the rainbow on the horizon to extend to you feet.  If you get someone to stand in on the other side of the spray the rainbow colours distort their colour which proves that its close to you.  Incidental, the person standing in front cant see the extended rainbow.

[lyner]

JS,
The scenario you describe is very common and shows how we see what we want to see.  The two 'ends' you see may appear to be at very different distances.
The distance where you think you see the bow is related to the objects in front of which it  appears to end. The bow is virtual - it isn't really anywhere at all.
Traffic spray over the front of the car will make you think that is where the bow is because the front of the car is near you and apparently not obscuring the bow. Hence, you see it as very close.  But you are no 'at it'.

[neveos]

I registered just to say I am not surprised there is some scientific debate about this, and to provide my own testimony: I can agree with the eyewitnesses here that I was most certainly "at" the end of the rainbow, and did experience passing through multiple colors (very bright) while driving through it.  We were in farmland on a remote country road, and saw the brilliant rainbow from a far distance. In agreement with the other posters, there was a second rainbow some distance away, but it was only a piece of a rainbow, as if broken, but nonetheless an interesting sight.  As we were admiring it, we realized we might appear to pass under it since we were heading in that direction.  As we got closer, we realized that we might actually approach, what appeared to be, the end of the rainbow.  The end of the rainbow was quite large, roughly the size of the road itself, and was touching down directly on the road ahead of us, and having played with the rainbows a water hose is capable of making, I had thought such an objectified manifestation of a rainbow was impossible.  I thought it might flea away, as it appears to do in smaller manifestations.  But, indeed, it did not do this, and we were amazed when we began to pass through the foot of this rainbow.  We did slow down, but I was not driving, so I don't know how fast, as there were cars behind us.  The interior of the car became very bright, and it did, in fact, change colors all around us.  I vividly remember my arm lighting up as though it were being shined upon by a sequence of colored lights.  The entire experience was so elating and momentary that it is very difficult to describe the experience in detail, but the only way to describe it, is that it was like a bubble of incredible luminosity that changed the surfaces around you different colors.

If I could speculate how this occurs, I would like to begin by saying that I thought that merely having my eyes approach the -end- of the rainbow were impossible.  As though I could only approach the center, like a hologram.  Indeed, I did approach the end of the rainbow, like in a leprechaun myth.  Secondly, I might remark that yes there was a light rain, and the conditions were very similar to the picture posted earlier in this thread (unknown whether it is legitimate or not, but it looked very much like that, although the rainbow itself was a bit more vivid and larger).  Lastly, I want to iterate the fact that it illuminated my skin with different colors.  It was enough colorization that my skin was another color completely.

How could this manifest?  Why didn't it act like the optical illusion that I can produce with a mist?  I suspect that if we thought about the fact that a rainbow is indeed the result of different colors of light being reflected (refracted) off of the atmosphere, then we can correctly claim that there are ROYGBV colors being casted -somewhere-.  It must be that the rainbow we passed through was simply the location of the highest concentration of these colors.  I honestly don't know how this could work, and that is what interests me greatly.

I can say with complete honesty and sincerity that it did occur just as I say.  I'm sure it would be of great interest to understand how this was able to occur.

[zincsulfate]

wow,these pics are very nice,the first pic seems that the man is living in the rainbow,the second one is also very nice.

[videoman.tv]

The critical factor is the angle of the sun relative to the water drops and the observer.  It has to be behind the observer, and it can't be too high in the sky, as the 'rainbow-projection' would, in that case, point into the ground.

Once you start moving towards a rainbow, you are changing the angle of the sun to yourself, and the rainbow you see would then appear to be in a different 'location' in the sky.

Once you arrive at a spot where it appeared the 'end' of the rainbow was, it is impossible for you to see light reflected off the rain drops that gave you that impression in the first place (the drops that are now in the same physical spot as the ones you saw before, which have all hit the ground by now).

For the same reason you can't see a rainbow from 'behind', you can't find the 'end' of one either.

It is a bit like trying to find the horizon, no matter what, the horizon changes as you move towards it, & by the time you reach that spot, the horizon is now off in the distance.

Another fact of rainbows to consider is that a rainbow isn't like a thin mirror, with all the reflecting drops falling in the same vertical plane. A rainbow visible to an observer at 'Spot A' could very well be comprised of drops a good distance apart, so long as the Sun-Observer angle is the same for all of them, there would likely be a very 'thick' rainbow.

However, if you define the 'physical' rainbow as
"those raindrops that, at a given time, reflect light to a stationary Observer such that he or she sees a ROY G BIV spectrum of light in the sky"  Under this definition, as raindrops fall, the new ones that now Occupy the same physical spaces as the original drops did at the defined 'moment in time' ARE the rainbow, and it would then follow that, although you can't see it, you could, in fact, stand 'inside' your 'rainbow'. You would have to go back to your original location to actually see the rainbow again.

So I change my answer, you CAN find the 'end' of a rainbow, it would be the rainbow you saw awhile ago, however, from "Spot A", it is ONLY visible to Observers of the correct height standing at "Spot A"



 

[damocles]

I am not convinced that these views are correct, and that a rainbow is always and necessarily a virtual image. A prism or a diffraction grating produces a real image, or at least real beams. They do not move with an observer's viewing position, and it is very easy to place a specific part of your hand in a particular colour of beam, and that colour does not change as you move your head while keeping your hand still.

I wonder if it is possible that in unusual weather conditions -- particularly if there is good light, and a fairly narrow funnel of precipitation -- the sunlight could be refracted or diffracted in a similar way to the way the "jewel" hanging in our window does, and produce real, not virtual, projected spectra.

[wolfekeeper]

The thing about rainbows is that the shadow of your head is always in the direct center of them. So no, you can never reach the end.

In a different sense, you are always at the end of the rainbow, you are at the pointed bit of the cone of the rainbow. The person beside you has their own cone that they're at the end of too!

[evan_au]

The light from a rainbow is produced by internal reflection at the back of a raindrop, and dispersion as it comes out the front of the raindrop.

At visible wavelengths, the rainbow appears at 42 degrees from the Sun. When we see a rainbow, we tend to turn so we can see the whole of it, ie we have our back to the Sun.

However, when we are driving, it is best to keep our eyes ahead on the road(!) If the road happens to be angled at 42 degrees to the Sun, you will seem to be driving straight into one leg of the rainbow, and it won't appear to be moving along with you.

The light comes from a shower of rain, which can be moving towards you or away from you (or, if you are driving, you can be moving towards it). If you get the timing right, the shower of rain can come between you and the car perhaps just 50 meters in front of you, making it appear as if this car is at the end of the rainbow (and raising the expectation that soon you will be, too).

You often don't get just one shower of rain, but there can be multiple showers. This is how you can drive through one rainbow, have it disappear - and see another one. You reverse, and see the first one again.

The giveaway here is that the narrow angle between red & violet in the rainbow does not change as you "approach" the end of the rainbow (see photo provided by Andrew K Fletcher). If you were truly getting close to the end of the rainbow, you would see that it expanded so that you were clearly driving into just (say) the green  band of colour, with the other colours off to the left and right of the road - but in fact all of the colours are still present, they all descend on the road ahead, they seem to cover less than 1 lane of the road, and you never drive into just one of the colours at the end of the rainbow.