I snapped a picture of a beautiful double rainbow after a short rainfall. I didn’t notice that the top rainbow was inverted color wise from the traditional order. Can someone please explain why the top rainbow is inverted please?
In: Planetary Science
It’s because the specific prismatic effect you’re seeing at that moment happens to peak at or very near to the top of visible light. After the prism peaks, the wavelengths of the light go back down through the visible spectrum so the parts you can see begin again where you stopped being able to see them (ultraviolet) and descends through the visible spectrum then goes infrared and disappears again.
Rainbows are caused by light refracted and reflected by water droplets in the air. When light enters the water droplet, it splits into its component colors, the same way it does in a prism. Then, the light reflects off the back side of the water droplet. Because the surface of the water droplet is curved, the red hits it at a different angle than yellow, green, etc. This causes the light rays to cross over, producing the familiar rainbow with red on top.
Double rainbows are the light that reflects *twice* inside the water droplet. Because it reflected off a curved surface twice, the light crosses over twice, reversing the order of the colors again.
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