Rainbows occur when the sun is refracted and reflected in drops of water. Most often this occurs as the sun emerges from behind clouds while it is still raining.

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When sunlight enters a raindrop it gets bounced or reflected off the back of the drop and then back again as it leaves the drop and as it bounces around in the drop the light gets reflected in many different angles and this creates the colors we see in rainbows. Sunlight consists of white light but that white light contains all of the colors of the visible spectrum. The colors of the visible spectrum are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Generally all of these colors are visible in rainbows and they appear in the spectrum order.

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As sunlight enters a raindrop it gets bent into different angles as it refracts and reflects. As sunlight gets bent we can then see the colors with red being visible first because it needs the least amount of bending and violet is last because it needs the most amount of bending to be seen.

In addition to rain drops, rainbows can be seen from many other sources of sunlight passing through water. Examples include: Water Falls

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Fountains

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hoses, seawater, mist, spray and dew.

Rainbows have long held a place in human hearts due to their beauty and difficulty in understanding exactly why they occur. In Greek and Norse mythology rainbows were believed to be paths between Earth and Heaven or the Realm of the Gods.

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Obviously rainbows tend to occur in places where the sunlight and rain frequently mix. More often than not this includes many islands from around the world. On one trip to the Hawaiian islands I saw no less than a dozen rainbows in a week. Most of them occurred on Kauai, the Garden Isle.

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In life I believe we should all chase our rainbows but always remember that you can never reach the end of a rainbow because rainbows are optical effects that depend on where you are viewing the sunlight being reflected in water.

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When moving towards a rainbow it will always move away from you and keep the leprechaun’s eternal pot of gold always safe in his hiding place.

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It’s the colors of the rainbow that are the true riches.

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