Rainbows are pretty cool — you can almost never see one without pointing it out to others around you. Of all the places I’ve been, Hawaii is the place I’ve seen the most rainbows — you can pretty much count on seeing one every day when you’re there. Once when on a cruise, a rainbow seemed to follows us for several days — we kept seeing it in various ports, as well as while we were at sea.
Rainbows are more than just pretty arches in the sky — they’ve been a part of mythology, science and art for I don’t know how long.
In the bible, the rainbow is an integral part of the story of Noah’s Ark and the great flood. After 40 days and nights of continuous rain, the world was flooded. Only Noah, his family, and an ark filled with pairs of animals survived. When the waters subsided, the ark came to rest and when Noah and his family emerged from the ark, they were met with a rainbow. It’s written that God made Noah a promise that he would never again flood the Earth and He created the rainbow as a symbol of His promise to humankind.
Rainbows are (usually) symbols of luck and hope in most cultures.
Maybe the best-known rainbow story comes from the Irish. It’s about how the rainbow leads to a Leprechaun’s pot of gold safely tucked away at the other end. One version of the story tells how faeries placed a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow and commanded Leprechauns to safeguard it.
In Asian cultures, rainbows are generally viewed as good luck omens. In Feng Shui, a double rainbow signifies meaningful and great things coming your way.
In Norse mythology, Bifröst is a rainbow bridge. The colored arc connects the Earth and Asgard (the realm of Nordic gods.) The gods travel to Earth on this bridge and Earthly warriors will eventually join the gods during Ragnarök (apocalypse) in the final battle.
But not everyone sees rainbows as good luck — some cultures view them as bad omens. Locations that suffer from periodic floods or cyclones don’t necessarily agree that rainbows are symbols of good luck. And some people believe that you should never point at a rainbow or you’ll have bad luck.
Rainbows are formed from water — whenever light (usually sunlight) hits a rain droplet, it creates a rainbow. If you have enough rain droplets, you can see a rainbow lighting up the sky. This is why rainbows often/usually form after a storm.
Rainbows are technically an arch of light. If you view a rainbow from an airplane, it looks like a circle of light. From land, you only see half of the rainbow’s arch — so rainbows really have no end….
The ingredients needed to make a rainbow are light and water. Since no planets that we know of has liquid water, Earth is (probably) the only planet in our solar system with rainbows.
Light has to be reflected twice to create a double rainbow, so you usually see double rainbows when the sun is low in the sky. The band between the rainbows in a double rainbow is called Alexander’s band — named after Alexander of Aphrodisias.
Aristotle had a theory on rainbows as part of his color theory. He thought the colors were related to the four elements — and — because Aristotle was a pretty smart guy, his theory was widely believed until Issac Newton came along. During an experiment with prisms, Newton discovered that a rainbow had sever colors in it —red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Actually, these are the only colors the human eye can see, and they are colors that make up a rainbow.
Just about everyone likes rainbows and there’s been a lot of songs written about rainbows…. I think one contains lyrics something like, somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue, and dreams that you dream really do come true…. so I guess it wouldn’t hurt to make a wish next time you see a rainbow.
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