The great thing about showers and sunny spells is the possibility for rainbows. Last week there were several days where the conditions were right for rainbows. Of course you don't get guarantees but with a little luck you can try and predict where one might appear. And sometimes it's also just a waiting game. I was however lucky last week and managed to capture a couple of nice images of rainbows on Islay. And no, there was no pot of gold, otherwise I would still be on Islay!! To refresh you memory here is a quote from wikipedia with an explanation before I show you the pictures:

A rainbow is an optical and meteorological phenomenon that causes a spectrum of light to appear in the sky when the Sun shines onto droplets of moisture in the Earth's atmosphere. They take the form of a multicoloured arc, with red on the outer part of the arch and violet on the inner section of the arch. More rarely, a secondary rainbow is seen, which is a second, fainter arc, outside the primary arc, with colours in the opposite order, that is, with violet on the outside and red on the inside.

A rainbow spans a continuous spectrum of colours. Traditionally, however, the sequence is quantised. The most commonly cited and remembered sequence, in English, is Newton's sevenfold red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. "Roy G. Biv" and "Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain" are popular mnemonics. Rainbows can be caused by other forms of water than rain, including mist, spray, dew, fog, and ice.

This wasn't a full arch but beautiful nevertheless and worth waiting for.

This Rainbow is composed of three images which I took on the same day as the one above from the road behind Keills near Finlaggan. Click on the image for the full size!

Tag: rainbow weather photography