What about Rainbows?

Question

I understand that a rainbow is caused by the droplets acting as prisms and splitting up the light. But how come that doesn't just make lots of tiny little rainbows for each raindrop, instead of one collective rainbow?

Answer 1

The key here is visibility.  Each drop in and of itself is not capable of being seen by the human eye.  Think of it like this.  There needs to be enough reflected light for it to be visible.  This means there has to be enough droplets for that. That is oversimplified but I think you can get understand that.

Answer 2

the rainbow effect, which you see is caused by sunlight shining  from behind you, at about 43 degrees,causing  the spectrum of colours, to be projected in an arch....<^><.......

Answer 3

You should ask the guys at snow-watch.co.uk - what they don't know about the weather isn't worth knowing!

Answer 4

You can't see every little drop separately. It's a load of drops put together essentially.

Answer 5

I agree with Dan.

Answer 6

Rainbows appear as the sun is shining in one part of the sky and rain drizzling in the opposite part, and if you turn your back at the direction of sun rays, a spectrum of colour appears like a bow, and if we look at the rainbow from a high enough building or from a low flying aircraft, the bow is actually a circle, that's because thousands of tiny spherical drops of H2O acts like prisms.

Ray of sunlight enters the tiny sphere of H2O near its top surface, dispersed and reflected into the water-sphere according to their frequencies, violet being deviated the most and red the least, and on reaching the opposite side of the water-sphere (convex and concave), colours of light partly refracted out into the air and partly reflected back into the lower surface of the sphere, this cycle of refraction and dispersion continues.

The angle of red light disperse at about 42 degree and the angle of violet light disperse at about 40 degree, drops of water-sphere when look from another angle forms other peoples rainbow in bow shape because the ground's in the way.

A double rainbow results from double reflection (and extra refraction loss), thus the secondary bow is much dimmer.