Most often, the multicolored bands pass right through the raindrops, but other times they are reflected, producing a primary rainbow at about degrees from the sun. Double rainbows occur when some sunlight is reflected back through the raindrops and go through the process all over again. But each time the process is repeated, the rainbow becomes fainter, which is what makes tertiary and quaternary rainbows so elusive. Then they should splay their fingers so that the distance between their pinky and thumb is at about a 17 degree angle.
Where their pinky stops is where the third and fourth bands should be. And then it helps if you have absolute torrential rain. Michael Theusner, an atmospheric scientist and amateur storm chaser in Schiffdorf, Germany, was one of the dedicated few. He was committed to sticking it out one stormy day and was able to snap the first-ever picture of a quaternary rainbow this past June. These storms are quite rare in northern Germany, so I went home and got my camera. Burns we won't use a ghostwriter.
Unlike ho-hum rainbows and even double rainbows sorry, awe-inspired YouTubers , but they happen quite a bit , triple rainbows are not your run-of-the-mill weather phenomenon. In fact, they're so rare that prior to a image that we'll talk about later there had only been five verified reports of triple rainbows in years [source: Byrd ]. Let's get a quick tutorial in how rainbows work. When light in this case, sunlight enters a raindrop, it reflects once off the back of the drop, and then bends again as it leaves the drop [source: Mass ].
This is when you see a single rainbow. If light is reflected twice in the drop of water, you're going to get yourself a double rainbow [source: Byrd ]. As we said earlier, double rainbows are not so unusual, because it's not that rare to have light coming from a couple of different angles.
But it's a way different story when it comes to triple rainbows. Technically the same idea applies — the water must reflect the light three times. Yet this is not so easy. There are specific conditions necessary to get the right light and atmosphere. According to Raymond Lee, a professor of meteorology at the U. Naval Academy, they include dark clouds and a shower of uniformly sized drops [source: Geere ]. Elmar Schmidt, from Germany's SRH University of Applied Sciences, alerted some amateur storm photographers to the challenge and they set out to get one on film.
Michael Grossman eventually succeeding in tracking one down after seeing a double rainbow in a storm. When the rain got even stronger, he turned around and snapped a picture of a tertiary rainbow in the sky -- capturing the first photographic evidence of the phenomenon.
Michael Theusner also managed to capture an image of what appears to be a quaternary rainbow. Rainbows are created when sunlight enters a raindrop and is separated out into its respective colours by refraction.
Most of that refracted light passes out the other side, but a small amount is reflected, which is then concentrated by the spherical shape of the droplet into a band at degrees from the sun.
A double rainbow is formed when not all the reflected light exits the drop, and is fed through the process again. It's dimmer because not as much light remains but clearly visible, just outside the primary rainbow, when the conditions are right.
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