I took this photo back in may after a rainstorm, but wasn't quite happy with it at first. After revisiting it to prepare it for a family member to use, I decided to re-edit the photo and clean it up a bit. This is one of my all time favorite images from the lake, with the sun beginning to set directly behind me when it was taken, allowing for the rainbow to be perfectly centered on the dock. There is even a hint of a double bow visible in the clouds as well, and you can see the bright area inside the rainbow as well as the bow itself reflected in the water, although broken up by the ripples.
I'm always fascinated by how refracted light passing through trillions of tiny water droplets comes together to make the same pattern every time, all due to the way each ray slows down and changes direction when passing from air into the water, then bounces around inside the droplets, until a portion of it exits out in roughly the direction it entered the droplet, but shifted by precisely the same amount based on the frequency of each wavelength of light.
Did you know that infrared and ultraviolet light rays are also part of the rainbow, and we would be able to see a much larger rainbow if our eyes were sensitive to more frequencies? What we see is just the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, but other colors are there in the sunlight as well, and they too get passed through the droplet prisms.
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