Saturday, 27 February 2010
Pretty Rainbows in the Sky ♥
4:32 pm
I'm sure all of us have seen rainbows before, right? And most of us also know from Mr. Lim's classes about how rainbows are formed. But how about some fun facts about rainbows?
In Norse mythology, the rainbow is seen as the road between the worlds of gods and men. Similarly, the Holy Bible has also mentioned rainbows in The book of Genesis (Gen 9:8-17) where it is a sign of covenant between God and all life on Eath. The Indians thought that rainbows are bridges between life and death, while the Greeks thought that it was a omen from the gods to foretell war or heavy rain.
But, we all know that a rainbow is an arc of light that has been refracted and reflected through raindrops (or sometimes drops of mist), into several colours. The different colours of the rainbow, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet, are caused because violet refracts the most and red refracts the least.
The rainbow is also always directly opposite the sun. Hence, from different viewpoints of different people, in different places, the rainbow would always be shown in different locations, depending on the position of the sun.
Another interesting fact about rainbows are that there is usually another larger rainbow that can be seen outside the primary rainbow called the secondary rainbow. In such cases of a double rainbow, the secondary rainbow always runs parallel to the primary rainbow. However, the sun's light is reflected twice internally in the secondary rainbow before ermerging from the raindrop, so the sequence of colours would be reversed, with red at the top and violet at the bottom. Also, secondary rainbows are usually harder to spot, as they are not as bright and not as prominent as primary rainbows.
Below are some videos found from youtube showing how rainbows are formed:
And the funniest:
Enjoy! :D