The beauty of Rainbows, and the Halos

If you have the opportunity to observe the sky during the day and preferably just
after the rain, you can sometimes see a rainbow. Sometimes when the sky is covering
you can also see a halo or iridescence near the Sun. Let’s see these different
phenomena in detail.

Sometimes the rainbow is not multicolored. If the drops of water are relatively large (2
mm) it will take a very intense red color with a little purple and green. On the other hand,
if the drops of water measure less than 0.3 mm the rainbow will be very pale but at least
twice as wide as an ordinary rainbow and all the colors will be visible. Between the two
extremes, if you observe a rainbow in which the red is absent you can deduce that the
drops of rain measure about 0.5 mm in diameter.

The colors blue and violet are always inside the rainbow, the red outside. Sometimes
there is a secondary reflection on drops of water that gives rise to a second rainbow
outside the first but whose colors are inverted. More rarely you can see a third rainbow
but it becomes very pale and is often partial.

Sometimes the rainbow is not multicolored. If the drops of water are relatively large (2
mm) it will take a very intense red color with a little purple and green. On the other hand,
if the drops of water measure less than 0.3 mm the rainbow will be very pale but at least
twice as wide as an ordinary rainbow and all the colors will be visible. Between the two
extremes, if you observe a rainbow in which the red is absent you can deduce that the
drops of rain measure about 0.5 mm in diameter.
 It was Newton, at the age of 23, who discovered in 1666 that the light of the sun
was made up of a mixture of colors. By passing the light through a prism he broke the
white light into several fundamental colors: these are the 7 colors of the rainbow, which
can be further reduced to the basic colors: blue, green and red.

Conversely, if you draw on a top a variety of radial stripes with the colors of the
rainbow, by rotating it rapidly all the colors will blend and reform an almost white color.
As Newton said, this discovery was really strange and created a real revolution at the
time.