In my lifetime, I have seen horizontal “rainbows” three times while looking out an airplane window in the early dawn. These three are: flying home from Ecuador, flying to Hawaii, and flying from Egypt. I write about the first time I saw a straight rainbow in the early dawn in my book, I Can’t Miss the Encore. I witnessed the first one while flying home with our family from Quito, Ecuador, on August 22, 2002. I don’t have a photo of that because iPhones had not yet been invented!
If you’ve never seen a horizontal (straight) rainbow, they look like this. This is a photo I took when Allen and I were flying to Hawaii in the early morning a few years ago. This was taken somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. You thought I was going to write, “over the rainbow,” didn’t you? See how the red starts at the horizon, then turns from red to orange, then yellow and green, then blue. They say that indigo is also somewhere up there. When the sky is darker, the next color is purple, as you will see in the next blog. A rainbow is just the opposite: the red starts on the top, then changes to orange, yellow, green, indigo, blue, and finally violet. Rainbow is my favorite color!
Saga of a Straight Rainbow
Here again on our trip home from Egypt, the red starts up on the top then changes to orange, yellow, green, indigo, blue, then violet way high in the sky.
But look at this rainbow. The colors are the opposite of those in the straight rainbow. with the red onto moving to orange, then yellow into Green, on to blue then purple on the underside of the rainbow. Allen took this magnificent photo from our yard looking east.