Double Rainbows

Submitted by ub on

Double rainbows are double cool, twice the pleasure and the fun!

Double rainbows are pretty sweet, and seeing two tonight sent a thrill down our spines because seeing two deserves twice the excitement. On City Island, A slice of NYC Paradise.

RAINBOWS: Delighting humanity since forever http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/rainbows.htm

The Internet just can't get enough of those double rainbows.

After a double rainbow formed over NYC tonight, Twitter erupted with posts about this natural phenomenon, breathlessly referencing the wildly popular "double rainbow" viral video that swept the Web this summer.

But what actually makes a double rainbow? To See it, rhe Sun Needs to Be at Your Back, Rain at Your Front

The sun needs to be at a low angle. Usually, the magic number's actually 42 degrees above the horizon or less. The sun would also need to be at your back and the rain at the front.

When a ray of sunlight hits a raindrop, it bends and then strikes the inside wall of the circular drop. As the light reflects back out of the raindrop, it bends again.

That internal reflection produces the arc of sunlight spread out across its spectrum of colors -- a rainbow.

A double rainbow is formed when there are two reflections inside a raindrop.

The secondary rainbow tends to be fainter than the first and it also displays the colors in the reverse order from the primary rainbow.