Red rainbow (w-615-16)

In gallery: Photos of the month (2005)
Related photos: Atmospheric optics Light in water droplets

Red rainbows are just like normal colored rainbows, but occur when the sun is hanging so low in the sky that it colors orange or red (due to Rayleigh scattering and also dust in the atmosphere). Since most of the blue and green light is filtered out if the sunlight must travel a long way through the atmosphere, these colors do not appear much in the rainbow, making it reddish. In fact, a red rainbow is somewhat smaller than a normally colored bow, because the blue and green color bands are almost absent.

Photographed with a Nikon FE and 35mm Nikkor lens, on Fujichrome Provia 100F.