These primary and secondary refraction effects from droplets of resin onspruce tree cones produce very intense colours, at 20 degrees and 90degrees from the Sun direction. The photos were taken out of focus and twostops under normal exposure to avoid colour saturation. In the secondarybow, there is some evidence of "supernumary" colours beyond the violet endof the spectrum, as evidenced by pink colour of the reflections.
This image was taken during a violent storm that produced golf-ball-sizedhail as it passed over. The interesting thing about this reflected-lightbow is that there was no large body of water to produce the reflection. The source of this reflection was most probably a wet highway, theTrans-Canada Highway, west of Calgary. Since this part of the highway wason a hill, the reflected-light bow appears relatively high compared to theexpected position from a horizontal reflection surface.
A good friend of mine is celebrating his birthday early in September. Recently, we celebrated his 53rd birthday on a Saturday evening in an Indonesian restaurant in the centuries-old city of the town of Utrecht, in the central part of The Netherland. This (school)friend was one of the three guys who initiated a group of youngsters at the end of the sixties and the start of the seventies (of the 20th century), interested in astronomy, weather and ... optical phenomena. The initiative grew out to the nowadays Dutch "Vereniging voor Weerkunde en Klimatologie" and the "Halonet" optical observers group. 
Helga Schöps searches ardently for color dispersion effects in nature (like this close up of the banded diffraction pattern). Rainbows are not the only source. Helga photographed these recently at Hermsdorf, Thüringen, Germany. One is evidently a partial rainbow produced by dew drops on the fine hairy structure. The other colours in the thistle seed heads are more mysterious. Do you have an explanation?
On August 31st at 01:00 I took some long-time exposures of the Westerhever Lighthouse in Nordfriesland (Germany). It was raining a bit but this didn't matter because I wanted to display the rays of the lighthouse. Home again I reviewed the photos and was a bit surprised about a kind of arc, originating at a point in height of the lantern room and sloping downwards until it ends +/- horizontal (see pictures 1 2 3). I thought it could be a type of refraction phenomena but I couldn't explain to me what is was exactly. So I placed the pictures in the Meteoros-forum. Mark Vornhusen and Christian Fenn told me, that this arc is a type of rainbow called "reverse lamp-rainbow" and that these photos are probably the first displaying this phenomena. Both a 42 degree arc as well as a 51 degree arc are to be seen at the pictures.
The rainbows originates from the horizontal Lighthouse-born lightplain cutting the hull of the "Minnaert-cigar", an apple like shaped figure that describes all those points in which light coming from a source of light is reflectet in an angle of 42° respectively 51° to an Observer. In case of an usual source of light at every point of the Minneart-cigar a rainbow is being generated. But because of overlaying of these rainbows the colour-addition leads to a white light and no rainbow can be seen. However the thin light-layer of the lighthouse-beam only allows forming of rainbows at a small window of the minnaert-cigar and the rainbow becomes visible.
Observed at Tuula (Estonia) on 10th September at 00:30. The fog condition was perfect at the time for the glory's rings merge into multiple supernumeraries. But the location was perfect as well which is surrounded by forest from east and west side generating the wind tunnel to blow the fog from the bog field in north or from the river in south. As long as I remember this location has been always very foggy and has been often flooded in spring-time. The light source I used was Johnlite-2940, which makes the car's headlights a joke.
at 43mm.
Dear fellow sky watchers,
Reinhard Nitze observed at Barsinghausen (Niedersachsen, Germany) on the morning of July 7, 2007 a strange rainbow produced by a passing shower. Owing to the low solar elevation it had a predominantly reddish colour. When he saw the photos he remarked on the strange step change in brightness, colour saturation, radius and width near the left-hand base of the bow (photo with unsharp mask). The change is marked on the photo by an arrow and is not an artefact because it is present on other images (1 2 3). The upper part of bow is considerably brighter and more strongly coloured although blues are weak and violet is completely absent. This is not easy to explain. A cloud might be shadowing the weaker part of the bow but that does not explain the width or radius change. Smaller drop sizes in the lower region might be responsible and could be obscuring rays from larger raindrops further away. Effects of reflected light bows can be ruled out because no water was nearby. Somewhat similar unusual rainbows were imaged by the Japanese observer Yuji Ayatsuka.
These pictures were taken on a flight from Geneva to Warsaw on 18 July 2007. Shortly, after the sun disappeared behind a bank of clouds, I was surprised to notice that the LCD display of my Lumix TZ-1 camera was showing a purple sun. As purple is not a colour not normally associated with the sun, my first thought was that my camera had been damaged by taking pictures of the sunset. However, it soon became clear that the camera really could "see" the sun - despite the fact that the sun was completely invisible to my eyes! In fact, the sun remained visible to the camera for about 2 minutes after it disappeared according to my eyes. 
