Rainbows over Hatteras ¦ WITH A SLIDE SHOW

By late afternoon on Friday, June 12, it looked as if Hatteras Island would get a really big thunderstorm.

The National Weather Service had posted a severe thunderstorm watch, and radar showed big blobs of red ? storms across the sound.  The thunder echoed as the sky grew darker, and the system moved west toward Hatteras.

Then the storms came and went ? with little of the stormy part.  Only a little over a tenth of an inch of rain was measured in Frisco.  There were only a few impressive claps of thunder.  And, according to the National Weather Service, the wind never gusted higher than 26 mph from the west.

But something even more impressive happened as the dark and foreboding gust front passed over the island.

The sky turned from black to almost navy blue, and then light became greenish, pink, and other colors, casting a strange glow over the landscape.

Next two rainbows appeared ? one very bright and one just a little more subdued.

Lynne Foster said that on her street in Hatteras village, the residents poured out of their homes with digital cameras to capture the sight.

?It was a really neat community event,? Foster said.

In Brigands? Bay in Frisco, Donna Thomas got so excited about photographing the rainbows that she slammed her fingers in a door.

Author Donald Ahrens in his text, ?Meteorology Today,? describes a rainbow as ?one of the most spectacular light shows observed on earth.”

According to the Google research I did this weekend, the traditional rainbow is sunlight spread out into its spectrum of colors and diverted to the eye of the observer by water droplets. The “bow” part of the word describes the fact that the rainbow is a group of nearly circular arcs of color all having a common center.

So-called ?double? rainbows include a secondary rainbow, fainter than the primary one.

According to a University of Illinois Web site, the secondary rainbow appears outside of a primary rainbow and develops when light entering a raindrop undergoes two internal reflections instead of just one (as is the case with a primary rainbow). The intensity of light is reduced even further by the second reflection, so secondary rainbows are not as bright as primary rainbows.

I was also curious about whether the folks who photographed the rainbow in Frisco and in Hatteras village were looking at the same rainbow.

I found this on the Rainbow Valley Web site in Colorado:

Do two people ever see the same rainbow?

No. As the eyes of two people cannot occupy the same place in space at the same time, each observer sees a different rainbow. Why? Well, because the raindrops are constantly in motion so its appearance is always changing. Each time you see a rainbow, it is unique in its own spectacular way! Many people consider rainbows to be an omen of some kind. It is an ancient desire rooted in our cultural mythologies.

We give you a slide show of some of the pictures folks have sent to us. Hope you enjoy, and if you have more photos, send them to us at editor@islandfreepress.org.

Rainbows over Hatteras

If you want to read more about rainbows

I found these Web sites interesting on the science of rainbows:
http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/(Gh)/guides/mtr/opt/wtr/rnbw/scnd.rxml
http://www.deltatech.com/rv/rainbows.html
http://eo.ucar.edu/rainbows/
http://science.howstuffworks.com/rainbow1.htm