• It is believed that rainbows were named depending on their shape. The arc appears like a bow (as in bow and arrows), and it was always raining when the phenomena appeared. Despite old folk tales about pots of gold and leprechauns at the end of rainbows, you will never reach the end of a rainbow.  Rainbows are hardly seen at noon. Rainbows are very common in the evenings and mornings. To form a rainbow, sunlight requires striking a raindrop at almost 42 degrees. On very rare occasions the moon’s light will generate a rainbow effect at night, known as a moon bow. Despite the fact that all we can easily see from Earth is white light, all 7 colors are very present. Rainbows often appear near waterfalls and in the tropical regions of the Earth. From an airplane, a rainbow will look like a circle. We can only see a portion of it on land. Earth is the only planet in the solar system where rainbows are possible. A fog bow, sometimes called a white rainbow, is a similar phenomenon to a rainbow. In many cases, when the droplets are very small, fog bows appear white, and are therefore sometimes called white rainbows. When droplets forming it are almost all of the same size, the fog bow can have multiple inner rings, or supernumeraries, which are more strongly colored than the main bow. The fog bow’s lack of colors is caused by the smaller water drops, so small that the wavelength of light becomes important. A fog bow seen in clouds, typically from an aircraft looking downwards, is called a cloud bow. Mariners sometimes call fog bows sea-dogs.

  

(Images/video taken from google/IE)