End of the Rainbow...

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Yup, I made it to the end of the rainbow...and no, there was no gold.

Seriously, this was super cool. It was a HUGE rainbow that we had been watching on our drive for several minutes. We actually caught up to the end...amazing!

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Oh man, at that splash of gold in the second pic...Leprechauns should have scattered and your suspension gone flat
 
Originally Posted by DriveHard
Yup, I made it to the end of the rainbow...and no, there was no gold.

Seriously, this was super cool. It was a HUGE rainbow that we had been watching on our drive for several minutes. We actually caught up to the end...amazing!


I don't know? Could be buried under that highway.
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Cool Pic.
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That is a double rainbow also. I have chased down the end of the rainbow a few times in my life.

Fun story. The first time I remember finding the end of the rainbow in my life happened to be when we were looking at a dog on a website called careforanimals.org. We happened to be checking out a dog we had found there and saw the rainbow, we were driving to the house and noticed it looked like the rainbow ended really close to where we were so we decided to chase it down before finishing the drive to the house. Well we found it, it ended in a puddle which also had a rainbow in it. We look at the address we are supposed to find and noticed we were already at the house. This happened to be the dog we adopted for my aunt and she was an amazing companion for my aunt for about 15 years of her life.
 
Wut? You can't go to the end of a rainbow as there is no such thing.

We are in serious need of some basic atmospheric physics in this thread...
 
One can create a small rainbow using a garden hose and reach and touch the end of it.

Not all rainbows are atmospheric, some are created from road mist and or low hanging mist such as in the case of the OP. Note how shallow it is compared to the atmospheric on in the second set of pics.
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You cannot "touch" the end of a rainbow regardless of how it is formed. It does not exist in a fixed location and is entirely dependent on the position of the observer. It is impossible to approach it whether it is produced by rain or a garden hose because "it" is not "there".

If it were a thing and was located in a fixed location then two people would see the same rainbow, which never happens. No two people ever see the same rainbow in the same location.
 
there was no gold there because I was the car in front of you and took it all....lol
 
Originally Posted by kschachn
You cannot "touch" the end of a rainbow regardless of how it is formed. It does not exist in a fixed location and is entirely dependent on the position of the observer. It is impossible to approach it whether it is produced by rain or a garden hose because "it" is not "there".

If it were a thing and was located in a fixed location then two people would see the same rainbow, which never happens. No two people ever see the same rainbow in the same location.


The three people in my car saw it...and we clearly got closer to it as we drove.
 
Originally Posted by DriveHard
The three people in my car saw it...and we clearly got closer to it as we drove.

It may have appeared that way, but a rainbow is entirely an optical artifact and does not exist in a fixed location. You cannot approach it, if it seemed like you did then that was part of the specific circumstances of the illusion.

It is not entirely correct to say this, but the only place the rainbow exists is at the surface of the observer's retina. But even then that's not technically correct since the rainbow truly does not exist anywhere. Rainbows are an extremely complex optical phenomena and are entirely dependent on the observer's position.
 
A rainbow is simply reflected light off water vapor. The water vapor and the reflection can be manipulated if you are creating it just a foot in front of you. I have done it many many times as a kid.

While its true that you can't hold light, but you can feel the water vapor that is reflecting the light.
 
Well under no circumstances do I think the OP is trolling anything. The appearance of a rainbow is a complex phenomenon and is influenced by many things. It isn't just reflection, it is reflection and refraction - and while driving through rain and spray you have a lot of that going on in multiple locations. What the OP observed is no doubt what he reported and photographed.

My comments were initially directed to the poster that said they had "chased down" the end of a rainbow many times and at least once saw it ending in a puddle. That is entirely impossible as one cannot under any circumstances "chase down" a rainbow. It will always appear to be ahead of or in front of you no matter what your location, you can never arrive at the rainbow's location since it does not exist. However, driving in a moving car with chaotic rain spray and the intervening interface of the windshield glass is completely different. Here you may actually be observing multiple rainbows overlaid onto your visual field which may indeed give the impression that you've "reached the end" of one of them.

Still though the fact remains that a rainbow is not a physical entity that can be approached in space, despite strong visual cues to the contrary under certain specific circumstances.
 
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