_Danforth_
Junior Acolyte
- Joined
- Mar 2, 2005
- Messages
- 85
I do a lot of driving for work - recently, a lot of this driving has been in Scotland. The weather up here has been an exciting mix of low-angled sunshine and driving rain; as you might expect, this means lots and lots of rainbows, hovering over the very pretty landscape.
My wife once told me she has a very clear memory of driving *right through* the coloured beams of a rainbow, with the inside of the car going yellowy-green because that's the colour the car passed through. We talked about it, and how optics says it's impossible, but it's a clear adult memory for her, and she concluded it must have been a different optical illusion from normal.
While that didn't happen to me, I did come a lot closer to a rainbow than I thought was possible under science.
Driving around the Trossachs about a month ago, through some rocky terrain, quite high up. Rainbow ahead of me, coming down on my right. Came round a bend in the road at about 35mph and - there was the end of the rainbow. It stopped on my side of the road, at what looked like no more than three or four car lengths ahead. As near as I could tell, the "end" didn't move as I approached it, but the colour intensity rapidly lessened - vanishing from my sight a split-second before I reached it.
It made me wonder about the legend of fairy gold at the end of a rainbow - a myth that makes more sense, if you can get that close! In my sheltered townie upbringing they'd only ever been in the distance.
How close can you get to a "classical optics" rainbow?
Or did I see something else entirely, a different effect, maybe through the rain spray hovering over the road? You get prism patterns watering the garden sometimes.
Is this also what happened to my wife?
Or can we all reach the end of rainbows and it's been hushed up by Big Weather? :-D
My wife once told me she has a very clear memory of driving *right through* the coloured beams of a rainbow, with the inside of the car going yellowy-green because that's the colour the car passed through. We talked about it, and how optics says it's impossible, but it's a clear adult memory for her, and she concluded it must have been a different optical illusion from normal.
While that didn't happen to me, I did come a lot closer to a rainbow than I thought was possible under science.
Driving around the Trossachs about a month ago, through some rocky terrain, quite high up. Rainbow ahead of me, coming down on my right. Came round a bend in the road at about 35mph and - there was the end of the rainbow. It stopped on my side of the road, at what looked like no more than three or four car lengths ahead. As near as I could tell, the "end" didn't move as I approached it, but the colour intensity rapidly lessened - vanishing from my sight a split-second before I reached it.
It made me wonder about the legend of fairy gold at the end of a rainbow - a myth that makes more sense, if you can get that close! In my sheltered townie upbringing they'd only ever been in the distance.
How close can you get to a "classical optics" rainbow?
Or did I see something else entirely, a different effect, maybe through the rain spray hovering over the road? You get prism patterns watering the garden sometimes.
Is this also what happened to my wife?
Or can we all reach the end of rainbows and it's been hushed up by Big Weather? :-D