Pictures. Phenomenal.
Seen here is the pretty striking view from my window these days, at about 7:46 this evening, when the last of the day's rains had given way to sunshine. That white arcy bit on the left is the London Eye, an immense sort of ferris wheel (observation wheel, I suspect they call it), that's been lofting people into the sky since 2000. I had hoped that the rainbow would be concentric with it, but clearly it's not. Out-of-frame on the right (I'm not so great at this photography stuff) you would see Big Ben & Parliament, as well as a large dome that I earlier mis-identified as belonging to St. Paul's (not so great at map reading, either).
I hadn't noticed that the rainbow marks a boundary between the appearance of light and the appearance of darkness. Does anybody know what causes this? Is it an artifact of photography or a phenomenon in the world? And, you know, what is reality, anyway?
Pretty rainbow, though. Right?
1 comment:
What a fantastic picture! I like the way you framed it to contrast the two arcs, even if they aren't concentric.
Regarding your question about the light/dark sky: "The sky is brighter inside the bow because rainbows are disks of light rather than sets of coloured rings. The primary bow is a shining disk brightening very strongly towards its rim." Um, duh.
This came from a website called Atmospheric Optics" which is actually pretty cool - has lots of pretty pictures and explains through diagrams all sorts of phenomena I've never even heard of before. And it's based in the UK.
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