A RAINBOW is one of the most beauiful sights in nature, and man has long wondered what makes it happen. Even Aristotle, the great Greek Philosopher, tried to explain the rainbow. He thought it was a reflection of the sun's rays by the rain, and he was wrong!
Sunlight, or ordinary white light, is really a mixture of all the colors. You have Probably seen what happens when light trikes the beveled edge of a mirror, or a soap bubble. The white light is broken up into different colors. We see red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet.
An object that can break up light in ths way is called "a prism". The colors that emerge from a band of stripes, each color grading into the one next to it. This band is called "a spectrum".
A rainbow is simply a great curved spectrum, or band of colors, caused by the breaking-up of light which has passed through raindrops. the rain-drops act as prisms.
A rainbow is seen only during showers, when rain is falling and the sun is shining at the same time. you have to be in middle,
the sun behind you, the rain in front of you, or you can't see rainbow! The sun shines over your shoulder into the raindrops, which break up the light into a spectrum, or band of colors. The sun, your eyes, and the center of the arc of the rainbow must all be in straight line!
If the sin is too high in the sky, its impossible to make such a straight line. That's why rainbows are seen only in the early morning or late afternoons. A morning rainbow means the sun is shining in the west and rain is falling in the east.
Superstitious people used to believe that a rainbow was a sigh of bad luck. They thought that souls went to heaven on the bridge of rainbow, and when a rainbow appeared it meant someone was going to die!
