Spectacular and Educational!

What an amazing way to end the day. Less than two hours ago, as the sun was setting in the sky, we experienced a double rainbow. According to Wikipedia (an online encyclopedia) a secondary rainbow is very rare. If you look at the secondary rainbow, which is usually fainter than the first rainbow (in our case it is just above the primary rainbow – you have to look hard for it), the colors are reversed!! An even more astonishing fact is that our primary rainbow has a supernumerary rainbow immediately below it. A supernumerary rainbow is a few detached rainbow “bows” which are various colors – in our case green and purple. This was a rare and extraordinary site indeed. Tony and I ran outside to take pictures just before it began to drizzle (I carried Tommy out so he could “see” it too). We also call our friends the Gandy’s so that their kids could look outside and see the rainbows. Everyone thought it was really amazing.

Here are a couple pictures of our rainbows.
In the first you can see the primary rainbow hovering just about our house. In the second you can see both rainbows above our roof - look hard, the secondary rainbow is pretty faded. They looked so close, I thought we'd be able to almost reach out and touch them!In the third you can see the secondary rainbow above the primary one, and you can almost make out the supernumerary rainbow below the primary one. The fourth is a close up of the supernumerary rainbow. You can see the extra green bow just below our bright primary rainbow (and you can see the secondary rainbow above the primary one too).