Super-Rare Quadruple Rainbow Captured In Stunning Photo In New York

[KamaAina]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/21/quadruple-rainbow-photo_n_7110548.html

Oh my god, it's a quadruple rainbow all the way.

The man who cried his eyes out at the sight of a double rainbow at Yosemite National Park might need to get a new box of tissues -- a woman in Long Island, New York, got a beautiful shot of an incredibly rare quadruple rainbow this week.

Amanda Curtis, CEO and co-founder of the fashion startup Nineteenth Amendment, tweeted the photo -- which appears to show four separate rainbow arcs -- early Tuesday morning, following some stormy weather:

The phenomenon Curtis captured is extraordinarily rare. In 2011, LiveScience reported that only five third- and fourth-level rainbows had ever been recorded in 250 years.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. Wow, that is wonderful! Great catch. n/t

[NYC_SKP]

2. These should be concentric

I'm suspect.

[panader0]

3. Colored Contrails

[NYC_SKP]

4. Unicorn emissions!

I won't say which kind, I wasn't there!

[NYC_SKP]

5. I looked into this. Not a quadruple rainbow, rather a water body reflected double coincident with..

... a primary double rainbow.

A direct double rainbow is evident, one inside the other. This is the one behind the trees with it's double outside the first and slightly dimmer.

The indirect double rainbow is reflected from a large body of water behind the viewer and appears higher in the sky, but with a different center, because it is a reflection.

[gratuitous]

6. Still pretty rare

But yeah, on first glance I thought "No, that's two double rainbows, not a quadruple."

Interesting (to me) thing about double rainbows is that the second rainbow is a reflection of the first, which is why the colors on the second rainbow is the reverse of what they should be.

[NYC_SKP]

7. Very cool! but colors should not be reversed.

The direct rainbow is refraction of light directly from the sun, white light, all wavelengths, no order.

The reflected rainbows are refracted from similar white light being reflected off the water's surface and sill has no color order until it reaches water droplets and is refracted.

In other words, the reflected rainbows are reflections of the direct rainbows; they are new rainbows from the reflected sunlight coming in from a lower angle, then refracted.

[eppur_se_muova]

9. The outer arcs are "second-order" rainbows, from double reclection inside the droplets.

Third-, fifth-order rainbows are normal order; second- and fourth-order are reversed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow#Higher-order_rainbows

[eppur_se_muova]

8. I had no idea they were *that* rare !

I saw a multiple rainbow in Pittsburgh many years ago -- at least four arcs, maybe five,some incomplete and very faint. I was on the twelfth floor of a building situated on a hillside, facing east with the sun to the west, after a very vigorous thunderstorm (in fact, Pgh's only tornado in the last several decades). As the sky to the west cleared, the fine droplets in the air to the East gave rise to one rainbow after another. Of course I didn't have a camera (we were still using film in those days)!

I'm really puzzled by the way the arcs appear so close together in that photo. The ones I saw were more widely spaced, except for the brightest two. The very outermost arc was extremely faint -- it seemed to fade in and out of existence as I moved the direction of my gaze -- and inverted (blue outermost, red innermost), as the two on the right are here. There was no large body of water in view, so none were reflection rainbows.

From the wiki I'm guessing the photo above is actually two twinned rainbows -- one primary, one secondary.