Your ability to perceive some of these colors is dictated by your physical location. Each drop in this curtain of liquid water is a tiny prism. They all break white light into individual beams of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet light. But your eyeballs will never see more than one color in a drop (if this). Everyone else exits the drop at the wrong angle to meet your pupils.
Purple is the lowest color of the rainbow because purple light comes out of the water balls at the sharpest angle: 40 degrees to its color. entry point. Meanwhile, the red light that is at the top of the rainbow is returning in your direction at an angle of 42 degrees.
Location is key here. antisolar point. This is the point in the sky or on the earth that is exactly 180 degrees from the sun from your point of view. On a bright sunny day, your shadow’s head marks the antisolar point. Each rainbow is a perfectly round ring. concentrated around this very place.
However, if you’re standing at ground level, you won’t be able to see the bottom half of the circle. Indeed, from this point of view, almost any part of the rainbow that falls below the horizon becomes invisible. One reason for this is that the close proximity of the Earth’s surface limits the number and concentration of raindrops within line of sight.
So the percentage of a rainbow visible to most people is directly related to the position of the sun. When our sunny neighbor barely looking beyond the horizonthe anti-sun point will be quite high, which will give you the opportunity to see a much larger rainbow than if the sun were higher.
Conversely, if the sun is more 42 degrees Above the horizon, it becomes impossible for ground-based observers to see any part of the rainbow. But when you’re on a plane, things get interesting. On rainy or foggy days, airplane passengers and pilots sometimes see full circle rainbows. Even better, captured in 2013 by photographer Colin Leonhardt. this picture circular double A rainbow while flying over the Australian beach of Cotteslow.