The Formation of a Rainbow
Sir Isaac Newton found that white light is composed of all wavelengths of visible light. White light is a mixture of all the colors of the spectrum, which are: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet. If we break up white light we can see the various components. A glass prism can be used to split white light into various wavelengths. This split occurs because each color in the white light has a different index of refraction. Thus, the different colors will respond differently to the glass. For example, blue light will refract more than the wavelengths corresponding to yellow, and yellow light will refract more than the wavelengths corresponding to red. This effect is called dispersion.
You can see a rainbow whenever you look opposite the sun at sunlit raindrops (or water drops). The raindrop acts like a mirror in that it reflects some of the refracted light back towards you, while other rays leave directly from the opposite side. These refracted rays are the ones that you see as a rainbow.
Thus, when the white light from the sun hits a raindrop the light is dispersed as it enters (like in the prism). The different colors undergo refraction and reflection due to the change of index of refraction between the water and the air.
The formation of rainbows by raindrops was first clearly discussed by Rene Descartes.
Let's assume that the rays from the sun are parallel and that all raindrops are spherical. Of the many paths taken by the rays through a (spherical) water droplet, several rays become concentrated near a minimum deviation angle. These rays enhance the intensity at that particular angle to produce the primary rainbow which we actually see. The ray which is produced at the mini...
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...epends on the size of the raindrops. For very large drops, the width of each color band will be narrow, therefore the various colors do not overlap too much, which results in fairly pure rainbow colors. On the other hand, for small drops each band of color can be so broad that all the colors overlap. This combining of overlapping colors yields a pale or white bow.
References
Greenler, Robert, Rainbows, Halos, and Glories Peanut Butter Publishing 1999
Laven, Philip, Optics of a water drop
Lee, Raymond L., and Fraser, Alistair B., The Rainbow Bridge Penn State Press 2001
Lynch, David K., and Livingston, William, Color and Light in Nature Cambridge University Press 1995
Lynds, Beverly T., About Rainbows
Minnaert, Marcel G. J., Light and Color in the Outdoors Springer-Verlag 1974
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Walker, Jearl, Light from the Sky Scientific American
...nd violet wavelengths are the shortest, and violet is the least visible to the human eye. These wavelengths are scattered throughout the day and caused by a redirection of the light-waves direction due to gas molecules in the atmosphere (Mc Knight, p. 84). When the sun is setting towards the end of the day there are few blue wavelengths left and we see orange and red which are dominant and the longest wavelengths of visible light to the human eye. At the bottom of the photo (closest to the setting sun) red and orange are the dominant visible colors with the occasional blue and almost violet. If our eyes could not see orange and red our sunsets would be a dark blue or black.
There were rays of sunlight that were depicted as well. The light in the painting seemed to be focused in the middle, where the stream was. Other areas and parts of the piece were dark or darker than the area in the middle. I think that a trick with shading or lighting was used. Perhaps, it was tenebrism.
By day it is a vision of dazzling whiteness, with its tiled court and plashing cool waters, its pointed arcades and lattice windows. At night it is equally effective with its thousands of lights and the rainbow colours of the cascade.
In 1794 he was elected a member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. There he read his papers and identified the phenomenon of colour blindness, which he and his brother shared. When showed a colour spectrum besides blue and purple Dalton was only able to recognise one other colour, yellow. Or as he says ?that part of the image which others call red appears to me little more than a shade or deflect of light. After that the orange, yellow and green seem one colour which descends pretty uniformly from an intense to a rare yellow, making what I should call different shades of yellow?
Newton, Henry, and William Winsor. "Spotlight on Colour: Flake White." Winsor&Newton. N.p., 2011. Web. 30 Apr. 2014.
that The Speckled Band is a product of its time as there is a lot of
striking the surface of the water or if it is just the reflection of the sun off of
In the physical sense, a rainbow appears after a storm in the sky. It is made up of seven different colors. As it forms an arch, we may look at its shape as being a segment of a complete circle. From the rainbows physical dimensions, Shange draws out other qualities that suit the fluidity and logic of her choreopoem. While it can appear a simple natural phenomenon we take for granted, Shanges choreopoem delivers the rainbow as a complex sustaining figure which forecasts a change in the weather and a change in the life of `the colored girls.' The rainbow is a powerful symbol in Shange's choreopoem. It is not only beautiful in one sense, but it's meaning is rather complex. There is more to the rainbow than its seven colors.
...ace Theory, Forster's Counter, and the Metaphysics of Color." The Eighteenth Century 53.4 (2012): 393-412. Project MUSE. Web. 15 Dec. 2013. .
the earth’s atmosphere the moon catches light from the sun and reflects it down to earth. As the moon reflects the sun’s light rays down to earth, those rays of light travel through the earth’s atmosphere in the form of different wavelengths which then produce different colors of visible light. For example when the moon is low in the sky and close to the earth’s horizon, light from the sun has to pass through more of the earth’s atmosphere in comparison to when the moon is high in the sky or positioned directly overhead. When this happens, air molecules filter out short wavelengths of visible light such as green, blue, and purple and scatter’s them throughout the earth’s atmosphere. When the moon is high in the sky...
However Spectroscopy is not a recent development, as it has been utilized for many years since Isaac Newton made the first advances in 1666. Spectroscopy is the study of light as a function of wavelength that has been emitted, reflected or scattered from a solid, liquid, or gas. Fundamentals of Spectroscopy Spectroscopy is the distribution of electromagnetic energy as a function of wavelength. Spectrum is basically white light dispersed by a prism to produce a rainbow of colours; the rainbow is the spectrum of sunlight refracted through raindrops. All objects with temperatures above absolute zero emit electromagnetic radiation by virtue of their warmth alone; this radiation is emitted at increasingly shorter wavelengths as temperature is increased.
Once upon a time high above the earth, fluffy white clouds drifted through the atmosphere. In the clouds lived a family Droplet of water, round and content with life. For as long as I could remember, I spent my days lying on my back, relaxing and soaking up the sun's warm rays. One day, I took my usual place in the sun but the light didn't seem to be as bright. In fact, as the day went on, it grew darker and darker, loud claps of thunder shook the cloud, and the Droplet felt as if he were getting so heavy he could hardly move. This is called precipitation.
Light is what lets you experience colour. The pigment of the retina in your eyes is sensitive to different lengths of light waves which allows you to see different colours. The wavelengths of light that humans can see are called the visible colour spectrum.
a bit of blue and a bit of green". When the light from the dots on the
Rain forms when water vapor condenses and falls, the more it condenses the more it falls. Some raindrops are not pure and are filled with other materials, this is known as acid rain. Acid rain is a huge problem all over the world. Acid rain is mixture of chemicals, like fossil fuels and the atmosphere, it then comes down as rain, snow, hail, and sleet. The burning of fossil fuels is the main cause of acid rain. When oil and coal are burned they create sulfur dioxide, nitric oxide, and nitrogen dioxide. (" Acid Rain | US EPA") The mixture of all the chemicals and heavy winds blow the compounds across many borders.