Friday morning, after a night of downpours, wind, and lightning, I awoke to the sounds of a coughing cat, so I got out of bed earlier than I had intended. There was no hairball, and Sheldon was fine by the time I crossed the room to check on him. I picked him up and carried him up the stairs with me, but we stopped on the landing to look out the window and see how wet the world looked. Much to my surprise, there was a great big rainbow rising into the sky just behind the houses across the street from us! What a wonderful way to begin the day!!!
I ran to get my camera before the rainbow disappeared, and was able to get several photos; in fact, the rainbow lingered for at least 15 minutes, which was amazing, and it actually got brighter as the clouds dissipated. Later, I got to thinking about the science behind the wonderment: a rainbow is sunlight spread out into its spectrum of colors and diverted to the eye of the observer by water droplets. Although you may think that a rainbow is made up of just seven colors – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet – in actuality, the rainbow is a whole continuum of colors from red to violet and even beyond the colors that the eye can see. How cool is that?!
According to the National Center for Atmospheric Research, no two people ever see the same rainbow, a fact I had never considered! “Since the rainbow is a special distribution of colors (produced in a particular way) with reference to a definite point – the eye of the observer – and as no single distribution can be the same for two separate points, it follows that two observers do not, and cannot, see the same rainbow. In fact, each eye sees its own rainbow!!” I think I’ll remember seeing this beautiful rainbow for a long time.
Whiskers on Kittens 