Today I stepped outside and was greeted with this image just after the clouds parted. Fortunately I had my camera ready to go. This view is at the Sierra Nevada foothills looking Northeast over Bidwell Ranch, CA. A light mist was falling and the sun was behind me. I had a wide view of the horizon. Perfect rainbow conditions enabled me to catch this rare full arc
This is a composite image of two photos, using panorama stitching software. There’s hint of a double rainbow too, see photos below.
Interesting thing about this property, it was purchased by the City of Chico and the local environmentalists consider it “sacred ground”, and have managed to convince the city to make it off limits and marked as “no tresspassing”. Look but don’t touch.
Here’s a photo from my weather station that shows the rainbow:
And here’s a better photo of the double rainbow:
The wonders of nature and weather are beautiful to see from mammatus clouds to anticrepuscular rays to Brocken Spectres, we live in a beautiful world that hasn’t changed as much as many would have us believe. Turn your eyes to the sky and away from those who say the science is settled… There is more here on this beautiful green earth than is dreamed of in the halls of academia…
A variation on the Alaskan rainbow above, photographed ca. 1967.
http://i817.photobucket.com/albums/zz94/rondewitt/NewYearsgreeting.jpg
Nice captures Anthony. Thanks for sharing.
If you even need “weather” pictures for WUWT, please drop me a line. I have hundreds of cloud shots … Chinook (lenticular) clouds, mammatus … big thunder storms… stuff like that. Also rainbows ..hail…funnel clouds (poor pix).
Say … you are a weather guy. I have a multi-shot pano of a rainbow under a blue sky..not a cloud for miles and there were indeed raindrops falling. Weird weather stuff.
Weather is VERY cool. Too bad “Al Baby” spoiled the fun.
Clive
Beautiful picture! Years ago we had a full arc double rainbow with hints of a third near the horizon ends. I got enough film shots to piece together a complete view, but in those days the technology didn’t exist to put them together into one image. I haven’t seen the photos for years but it might be time to hunt them up and see if my limited Photoshop skills can manage to put them together.
Thank you Anthony, the moderators, and all the members of this amazing blog. I have never learned so much in one year. All of you are great.
Happy New Year!
Have any more cities around the world turned up with bodgied data like Darwin? It makes anywhere suss.
Australian MSM are still publishing articles about polar bears dying because of warming. It makes me wring my hands.
Kevin Kilty (21:14:52) :
Keith Minto (20:23:32) :
Q.
What is the name of the area between the primary and secondary rainbows ?
Alexander’s band. Not to be confused with Alexander’s Rag Time Band.
The chocolate is in the mail :)… I recall reading Scientific American in the 1970’s referring to it as Alexanders Dark Band. Sort of a name that sticks.
BTW, did you notice that in the double the color sequence is reversed.
Keith, I seem to remember that the space ‘twixt’ the bows is called the “taint,” as in “taint part of one or t’other.” Or maybe I’m confused.
Lee Kington (21:22:26) :
I did take the liberty of playing with it….a touch more contrast and a bit of manipulation to the foreground thereby enhancing the visual impact of the rainbow arc.
Isn’t that what CRU was doing ?
Rainbowgate exposed !
.
If I recall from AtmSci 201, any phenomenon in the atmosphere is called a meteor. The two rainbeaux have reversed color schemes. When flying, it’s often possible to see the complete circle double rainbow, with the aircraft shadow in the center.
Keith Minto (21:40:55) :
The chocolate is in the mail :)…
I thought you might have said “in the e-mail”. Alexander’s Dark Band is truly dark. In contrast, the sky is quite bright inside the primary where you can often see lots of supernumerary bands.
Apparently this year is going to be the hottest year on record, in Australia and the rest of the world:
http://www.news.com.au/national/weather-experts-expect-mercury-to-soar-in-year-ahead/story-e6frfkvr-1225815414199?from=igoogle+gadget+compact+news_rss
I’ll believe that when they can predict the weather in 7 days time correctly!
Not as good for Calcutta though:
It could turn out to be the coldest Calcutta winter ever….The lows this month could herald a record-breaking January-February,
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1091228/jsp/calcutta/story_11915674.jsp
Almost every complete rainbow–and double rainbows, for that matter–I’ve ever seen have been north of Sacramento in that stretch of the Central Valley before the mountains start. It’s a nice way to start out the new year at the very least, so thanks for sharing.
L (21:47:22) : Keith, I seem to remember that the space ‘twixt’ the bows is called the “taint,” …
Sweet!
David Wendt (21:41:02)
Wikipedia has a good explanation of this… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander%27s_band
OT, how do I create italics, underline, make words bold, etc, including the link ‘here’ from the comments section ?
REPLY: [ The link self forms if you just past the hyperlink address in as it appears in your browser (but you do need to have white space on both side. You had a . touching the leading “h” and that confuses the auto form process…)
Other “tags” are used for the other things.
See: http://www.w3schools.com/HTML/html_formatting.asp
for a list of more. Not all of them will work with wordpress, but you can look around and try some things. Different blog hosts will support different sets. “block” for example does indented paragraph quotes.
-mod. ]
When I was a little boy, my parents used to tell me that if you walk underneath a rainbow, you will change from a boy to a girl (and vice versa).
I was SCHITT scared of rainbows for years a little kid/
and a great way to start the new year
2009 wasn’t too bad for droughts in the US—despite all the noise made about Georgia
Top U.S. weather story of 2009: drought hits a 10-year low
The weather gods were unusually kind to the U.S. in 2009, as the nation had no hurricane landfalls, a relatively quiet tornado season, no billion-dollar floods, and the lowest drought footprint of the decade by year’s end.
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/article.html
Keith Minto (22:24:44) :
OT, how do I create italics, underline, make words bold, etc, including the link ‘here’ from the comments section ?
Click the ‘Resources‘ link in the navigation bar atop this page, then go to the post by
Ric Werme (15:11:37) :
He has a list of the various html markup codes that work on this site.
Nice shot.
Atmospheric Optics is to website to visit to learn everything you’d want to know about rainbows.
http://www.atoptics.co.uk/bows.htm
Mike McMillan (22:49:50) :,
Thanks Mike, thought I had better scrub up the presentation for 2010 !
So what is the name of the space between secondary and tertiary rainbows? Alexander Jr’s band?
Keith Minto (22:24:44) :
… including the link ‘here’ from the comments section ?
For links, you can type the full url, as in
http://wattsupwiththat.com/
and it will automatically be linkified. Alternatively, to make here a link, do it like so-
<a href=”http://wattsupwiththat.com/” alt=””>here</a>
If you optionally stick something within the quotes in the alt=”” part, it will show up as a tooltip when you mouse over the link.
Sure hope I didn’t mess that up.
@ur momisugly Mike McMillan (23:11:59) : You can just leave the “alt” part out if you are not using it, it’s not required.
How did you get the example to show up?
kadaka (23:44:36) : How did you get the example to show up?
Recursion: See recursion.
Ok, an HTML tag is a ‘markup language’ character. To get it to “show up” and not be stolen by the text processor, you need to use a “meta character”. And for me to get an example of the “meta character” to show up I need to use a “meta meta character character” … 😉
Then, to show you how to display the “meta meta character character” I’ll need to recurse one more level… Then someone will ask….
But I digress. Or regress. Or recurse. Or something.
Ok, so we know that < is special and will be stolen, so to make it show up I need to type the metacharacter for it, which is an ampersand followed by lt followed by a semicolon: <
But to make THAT show up, I must make the leading & a metacharacter and the metacharacter for that is & so my above example was entered as &lt; but this example for the example had to have it’s leading & made into a meta character, so it was.. FUNT! brain boggle, core dumped, reboot in progress..
[time passes]
Got it?