Your Personal Rainbow Is Following You

Has there ever been a bigger celebrity than the rainbow? Worshipped from ancient to modern times, visiting the emptiest landscapes and most crowded cities alike, it follows us from childhood to old age.

To see a rainbow in the sky, face away from the sun when it’s raining and sunny at the same time.

You may have noticed strangers alerting each other to the arrival of the rainbow. Will the news spread fast enough for everyone to see it before it disappears?

A rainbow is created by sunlight interacting with droplets of water suspended in the air. This means that it exists in three dimensions, yet it’s intangible: a sudden ghost. It is always a partial or full circle.

Like a shadow, it is determined by the relationship between the viewer and the sunlight, meaning each person sees a slightly different rainbow.

A rainbow that appears close by, like the one you might see in a sprinkler or the spray of a garden hose, looks small. A rainbow that appears at a distance looks huge. In a certain sense, the rainbows are the same. Its apparent size is determined by how far away from you the water droplets are.

Because of this, it’s possible to create a rainbow in any sunbeam. I noticed a rainbow in the mist of my spray bottle years ago while watering plants.

I photographed it from all different angles, vowing to spend more time creating rainbows for my personal pleasure, but I mostly forgot about it until now.

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With a small spray bottle, I sprayed the air looking for the rainbow. Once I found a fragment of its arc, I sprayed to follow it.

Not only was it a complete circle, but it ringed my body like a hula hoop, tilting only slightly in the early afternoon.

I used the spray bottle to activate the rainbow again and again at different times of day, realizing the circle was perpendicular to the direction of sunlight. As the sun lowered, the tilt of the ring became steeper, making me feel like a planet. I couldn’t believe it had been potentially lying in wait the whole time, and activated by something so simple. Closer to sunset, the circle seemed to have slipped off my body. It hovered vertically next to me like a portal.

I’ve come across two memes that offer a visualization of the relationship between the ring’s size and position and the angle of sun, as well as how close rainbows relate to distant rainbows. One is from an educational page called General Knowledge Booster and the other is from the cartoon XKCD by Randall Monroe.

Imagine the sun at the viewer’s back, and a cone extending out from their eye. The rainbow appears in a ring on (“slice of”) this cone where the water droplets are: if this happens at close range, the rainbow looks smaller, and if it happens far away, it looks larger.

The Nature of Light and Color in the Open Air is a 1954 book by Marcel Minnaert. It was this book that inspired this newsletter. It features the rainbow on its cover. He writes:

“Rainbows can be seen as closed circles, when there is a sufficient number of drops of water below the line of our horizon too. If we move, the rainbow moves with us; it is not an object, it is not visible at a definite place but in a definite direction; one might say that it behaves as something infinitely far off, which moves with us in the same way that the moon does (p. 174).”

He emphasizes that rainbows are never seen at mid-day in the summer, because the angle of sunlight is simply too steep. He describes rainbows seen at closer range in gardens and within waterfalls and fountains, noting that “along the side of a steamer where the waves break against the bow and splash into foam, rainbows are sometimes seen to accompany the ship for quite a long time (p. 173).”

If rainbows never existed, could humans have even thought of them in even the most outlandish fantasy? It is hard to believe they are real, but they are, and they are one of the greatest gifts that fate could ever give us. Activate yours today by pulling the trigger of a spray bottle, or just wait, and eventually a distant rain will bring it into being.

All Photos By Emily Wick Unless Otherwise Noted

“It’s a shame we put showers in our bathrooms. They should be outdoors.”
-Brian Brooks, after editing this post.