• Question: a double rainbow i saw a couple months ago. what causes a double rainbow opposed to a normal rainbow

    Asked by anon-267552 on 12 Nov 2020.
    • Photo: Bradley Young

      Bradley Young answered on 12 Nov 2020:

      Rainbows are caused by light ‘reflecting’ and ‘refracting’ (splitting in to colours) inside a water droplet. A second rainbow is caused when light is reflected twice inside the water droplet.
      —
      So a second rainbow will always appear when there’s a rainbow but they are always fainter than the first rainbow so you can’t always see them.

    • Photo: Katherine Manfred

      Katherine Manfred answered on 13 Nov 2020:

      If you looked closely, you might have noticed that the second rainbow has the colours in the opposite order because of the double reflection that Bradley mentioned!

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