Morning Here Looked Like This

Comments

1. Farley says:
   October 19, 2012 at 8:18 am

   Purty.

   It’s cold and dark here! 52 F!
2. Annie says:
   October 19, 2012 at 8:18 am

   You are just taunting us at this point.
3. KevinQ says:
   October 19, 2012 at 8:29 am

   Have you taken your shovel to that red barn, yet? I’m thinking there’s some gold buried there.

   K
4. John Kerr says:
   October 19, 2012 at 8:55 am

   Hmm, that’s not West; not if the top one is East. So, not 180°, either. The vertical bisector of the rainbow has to be directly opposite the rising sun, and since a rainbow is about 84° in diameter, I’d say you turned (180 ± 84/2)° = either 138° or 222°. To narrow it down further, I really need to know whether you turned left or right?
5. John Scalzi says:
   October 19, 2012 at 9:02 am

   STOP WITH YOUR EXACTITUDE YOU NERDY NERD NERDNIK.

   Also, I turned 180 degrees, and then from that vantage point aimed my camera slightly to the south west.

   SO THERE.

   Although this does bring up a technical point I was wondering about. It seemed to me, at least, that the rainbow was one of the tallest/widest/etc that I’d seen, and I hypothesized that — if in fact it wasn’t just an optical illusion — it might be because the sun was so low in the sky, i.e., literally right over the horizon, and I was seeing more of the arc. Thoughts on that?
6. hugh57 says:
   October 19, 2012 at 9:12 am

   Annie: He’s only doing that to the tauntable. And only since 1998. ;-)
7. John Kerr says:
   October 19, 2012 at 9:42 am

   John Scalzi: Yup, low sun = big rainbow, because these three things: (a) the sun behind you, (b) your head, and (c) the dead centre (pardon my Scottish!) of the rainbow in front of you, always lie in a straight line a-b-c. Think of yourself as the dog recovering from surgery, the rainbow as one of those conical head funnel collars, and the sun steering you, using your tail as a rudder!
8. parkrrrr says:
   October 19, 2012 at 9:45 am

   Hugh: It doesn’t say “Taunting only the tauntable” so your conclusion, while apparently reasonable, is not necessarily logically sound. It’s possible that he’s also taunting the untauntable, and even that he has been doing so for much longer. We just can’t know from the presented information.
9. Matt O says:
   October 19, 2012 at 9:46 am

   @John: Yup. Rainbows are circles, and are directly opposite the Sun on a line drawn THROUGH YOUR HEAD. So the higher in the sky the sun-you-rainbow line ends, the more you see.
10. John Scalzi says:
    October 19, 2012 at 9:58 am

    I am delighted to see that my understanding of basic geometry is sound.
11. Elaine in Ohio says:
    October 19, 2012 at 10:04 am

    “It doesn’t suck to live here.” I rather like that for the next Ohio slogan on our license plates. It certainly sounds better than “The Heart of it All.”
12. ldgilmoure says:
    October 19, 2012 at 10:41 am

    @John Kerr: Best rainbow/dog analogy I’ve read in a long time.
    *golf clap*
13. katyasozaeva says:
    October 19, 2012 at 10:49 am

    That is just gorgeous. It was dark here about that time – or maybe it was just that my eyes were closed. The first morning I actually slept through sunrise in over a week…
14. Jeanne says:
    October 19, 2012 at 10:53 am

    Lucky you! It’s good to love where you live! Enjoy!
15. Sooz says:
    October 19, 2012 at 11:56 am

    Woweee!
16. Donna Leonard says:
    October 19, 2012 at 3:14 pm

    Ohio: It doesn’t suck to live here.
17. canyon42 says:
    October 19, 2012 at 5:09 pm

    More like “Ohio: It doesn’t suck to live here ALL the time.”

    Another way of describing the geometry involved is what I say to my students: What is at the exact center of every rainbow you see? The shadow of your own head.

    In that sense, you can say that there is no such thing as “a” rainbow that we all see–each of us sees a slightly different rainbow that is all our own.
18. Greg Metcalfe says:
    October 19, 2012 at 7:44 pm

    Matt O nailed it. If you fly much, and grab window seats, it’s not too unusual to see a full circular rainbow directly opposite the sun.
19. christy says:
    October 20, 2012 at 10:39 am

    Lovely. It looks as thought the rainbow was shooting out of the ground – nice effect.
20. Rhonda says:
    October 20, 2012 at 12:08 pm

    Also nice to see from an airplane window seat is a glory. They are a small full circle rainbow (once I saw a double rainbow glory but couldn’t capture the outer one on my camera) with an airplane-shaped shadow in the middle of it.
21. Christopher Hawley says:
    October 23, 2012 at 7:06 am

    Lemme get this straight:  It’s early morning; looking eastward one sees the sun is barely up, but looking westward the sky appears to be much brighter – blue rather than black.
    This suggests that either there is a huge difference in exposure length/aperture between the first and second image, or Ohio does sunrises differently than the rest of the world … or perhaps I’m really dim and in need of enlightenment.  Heh-heh.

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