eli5 why is it that when a double rainbow happens the one on top has inverted colors?
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The main rainbow is formed when light reflects off of a water droplet once. In the second one, the light reflects twice inside the droplet.
[Here’s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow#/media/File:Rainbow1.svg) a diagram. You can see that before the light reflects the first time, the red and blue separate, then switch sides when reflected. If they were to reflect off the droplet again, they would flip again.
If you’ve ever been to a carnival funhouse and seen the curved mirrors, you’ll notice that the concave (curved inward) mirrors flip the image upside down.
This is what’s happening inside a raindrop to produce the first rainbow.
The second rainbow is produced when the light rays bounce off one more part of the raindrop or you can think of it as another mirror flipping the image again.
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