When the rainbow appears on the sky what does this mean?
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1- It means there is water + light in the sky!\n\n2- It means God is remembering us that he loves us! Because this is the symbol of his promess of not trying to destroy the Earth or the human being!\n\n3- It means there is a pot full of gold in its end!
781942
Why not teach on the first rainbow; in the story of Noah? The rainbow represents G-d's promise to never destroy the world again with a flood. Rainbows represent mercy.
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It has to do with the angles of refraction.  Rainbows are formed when you have the sun behind you and the sun is hitting a group of water droplets in the direction of the rainbow.\n\nThe light from the sun hits a droplet, bounces around and comes back out toward you at an angle of around 42 degrees (technically between 40 and 42 depending on the color).  In fact it is hitting lots of droplets and rays are bouncing in all sorts of directions, but only the ones that bounce toward *your* eyes are the ones you see.  It turns out that you see all drops that are 42 degrees from your viewing point.  That would be 42 degrees up, 42 degrees left, 42 degrees right, 42 degrees up and left, etc.  If you think about connecting all those points, it forms an arc, not a straight line.  An illustration is included in the 1st link below.\n\nIf you are in an airplane, you can actually see a full circle but because we are usually on the ground, you can't see the bottom of the circle.  Tale a look at the 2nd link.\n\nFinally, if you look closely at a rainbow in a sprinkler, you *will* notice an arc.  It may be a much smaller portion of the circle (since you have a small sprinkler compared to a large bank of rain droplets), but you should see the bend.  And example is in the 3rd image link.\n\nAnyway, the arc of a rainbow has nothing to do with curvature of the earth or a "cylinder" of light.  It's all in the angle of refraction in the light rays.
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(m)\n\nAs the sun begins to set, the light must travel farther through the atmosphere before it gets to you. More of the light is reflected and scattered. As less reaches you directly, the sun appears less bright. The color of the sun itself appears to change, first to orange and then to red. This is because even more of the short wavelength blues and greens are now scattered. Only the longer wavelengths are left in the direct beam that reaches your eyes\n\nThe sky around the setting sun may take on many colors. The most spectacular shows occur when the air contains many small particles of dust or water. These particles reflect light in all directions. Then, as some of the light heads towards you, different amounts of the shorter wavelength colors are scattered out. You see the longer wavelengths, and the sky appears red, pink or orange
100945
If you want a very simple answer, here it is:\n\nThe white light from the sun is a mixture of all colours of the rainbow.\n\nA clear cloudless day-time sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter red light.  When we look towards the sun at sunset, we see red and orange colours because the blue light has been scattered out and away from the line of sight.
655891
It doesn't matter if the rainbow appears around the sun or on the ground after a rainshower. The two rainbows are called primary and secondary bows. There are two because the sunlight is relected off the inside of a water droplet twice instead of once; once would result in only one rainbow. This all depends on the angle in which the sunlight enters the water droplet.\nThe secondary bow is fainter and  the colors are reversed.
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As spijk says, the rainbow is formed by the refraction (bending) of light as it passes trhough rain drops. But the reason an observer sees the rainbow as an "arc" is that the sunlight must be refracted at a certain constant critical angle between the arrival of the light ray and the path back to the observers eye for the colors to be seen. This angle occurs over an arc in relation to the observer.  Here's why:\n\n   There are three conditions necessary for the rainbow to be visible:\n\n  First, there has to be water droplets in the air (These   droplets may or may not be falling to the ground as rain), and -\n\nSecond: -  the sun must be behind the observer while looking at the rainbow - and -\n\nThird: - the light rays that become visible as the rainbow must pass through the raindrops at the critical angle.\n\nIf you draw these conditions out in three dimensions, it is apparent that the necessary conditions only prevail to the observer as an arc.  \n\nBy the way, the rainbow is not always a semi-circle! If you're airborne, above the droplets with the sun high in the sky, you will see the rainbow as a circle!\n\nI fly my own plane and have seen this condition on several occasions, and even took a picture of it once!\n\nNow you can understand why seeing rainbows is relatively rare - the conditions for their appearance are not very common, mainly because you have to have water droplets in the air at the same time that the sun is not blocked by clouds!  That's why the most common time to see a rainbow is after a relatively small afternoon thunderstorm cell passes your position (usally passing from west to east), dropping rain beneath it as it passes and then leaving clear sky behind allowing the sun rays to strike the raindrops.\n\nGo to the website below for diagrams on how the rainbow works! A picture is worth a thousand words, especially a picture of a rainbow! :-)\n\neo.ucar.edu/rainbows \n\nBy the way, good question!  You have a keen mind, keep asking questions!  After reading and doing your homework, its the best way to learn!\n\nHope this answer  helps.\n\nCharlieQ
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When light and water meet in the sky on a summer's day, for a few moments, a rainbow will appear. Such a beautiful sight! This phenomena of the atmosphere appears during or immediately following local showers, when the sun is shining and the air contains raindrops. A rainbow can best be seen with polarized sunglasses. We cannot follow the arc of a rainbow down below the horizon, because we cannot see those droplets in the air below the horizon. But the higher we are above the ground, the more of the rainbow circle we would see. That is why, from an airplane in flight, a rainbow will appear as a complete circle with the shadow of the aitplane in the center.\n\nThe bow is divided into bands displaying the different colors of the spectrum and is formed by the refraction and reflection of the sun's rays in drops of rain. Reflection is simply the return of light waves from the raindrop's surface. Light which appears to be white, is really made up of a mixture of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet light
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I have been told it is hail and the sunlight is refracted from  it and thats why it looks green.  The brighter the green the more hail is in the sky
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Well I think they appear as lines; fat, multicolored, curved lines.  But they aren't really "there" where we see them.  That is, other people, say a mile away from you, will see the rainbow shifted from where you see it, and that's because the rainbow's apparent direction is relative to the sun's rays that are near you.  But is this the answer to your question?  Are you asking why they're not thin? straight?  Give us something, Bea.
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It is a second rainbow caused by the way light reflects inside of raindrops.  They will appear between 50 and 53 degrees above the horizon and the colors are inverted.  There is also a band of darker sky between the two, this is called an Alexander's band.
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The sky is blue partly because air scatters short-wavelength light in preference to longer wavelengths. \nWhere the sunlight is nearly tangent to the Earth's surface, the light's path through the atmosphere is so long that much of the blue and even yellow light is scattered out, leaving the sun rays and the clouds it illuminates red, at sunrise and sunset.\n\nso\n\nAn old weather predicting adage rhythmically states: \n\nRed sky at night, Sailors' delight.\nRed sky in morning, Sailors take warning. \n\nHumidity in the air is indicated by red skies at sunset-- red sky at night-- or, at sunrise-- red sky in morning. The forming raindrops scatter the short-wavelength blue light so that only the long-wavelength red light reaches the observer.
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We can see two simultaneously rainbows sometimes. The first one is produced by one internal reflection inside the raindrop, and the second one is produced by two internal reflections.\nTheorically, light can reflect more times inside the raindrop, but I think nobody has seen a third rainbow.
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because the bands of color that appears when the Sun's rays are refracted and reflected by drops of mist or rain. The colors of the rainbow are conventionally said to be red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.\nIn shorter words the drops of water work like a prism that when are touched by the sun'srays thansform light into many colors that then form many bands called rainbow.
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A rainbow is created when white light from the sun enters droplets of water in the sky and is refracted. The light is refracted when entering spherical droplets, then it is reflected inside them and refracted again upon leaving. This bends the light, as you would see in a lens.  The red end of the spectrum bends less than the blue, which is why they separate when they come out of the drop.\nWikipedia has a page about rainbows, with some diagrams which may help you understand.\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow
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The sky is (roughly) that part of the atmosphere or of outer space visible from the surface of the earth (or any other planet; see Skies of other planets). Birds, airplanes, and kites are often considered to fly in the sky. It is difficult to define precisely for several reasons. During daylight the sky has the appearance of an opaque blue surface, but this is the result of the air scattering sunlight. [1]There is no "blue object" above the earth in any normal sense, so it is hard to say what object the sky is. The sky is thus sometimes defined as the denser gaseous zone of a planet's atmosphere. At night the sky has the appearance of a black surface or region scattered with stars. But if we then say that the sky is the entire visible universe, it would not be the same thing we see during the day. The color of the sky is a result of diffuse sky radiation. On a sunny day the Earth sky usually looks as a blue gradient — dark in the zenith, light near the horizon (due to Rayleigh scattering). It turns orange and red during sunrise and sunset, and becomes black at night.\n\nDuring the day the Sun can be seen in the sky, unless covered by clouds. In the night sky (and to some extent during the day) the Moon, planets and stars are visible in the sky. Some of the natural phenomena seen in the sky are clouds, rainbows, and aurorae. Lightning can also be seen in the sky during storms. As a result of human activities, smog during the day and light radiance during the night are often seen above large cities (see also light pollution).\n\nIn the field of astronomy, the sky is also called the celestial sphere. This is an imaginary dome where the sun, stars, planets, and the moon are seen to be travelling. The celestial sphere is divided into regions called constellations.\n\n\nSky in religion\nMany cultures ascribed strong religious qualities to Earth's sky, believing it to be the home of the heavens and various deities. Among the Chinese, in certain situations, sky means god. For example, people may say "They became friends after several fights: this is the idea of the sky" or "Why does the sky always fool me?" Some religion and art historians believe that in Christianity, in particular, the connection between heaven and sky arose because of a medieval painting technique, where different places were drawn separately on the same picture. Heaven, a different and more important world, was usually painted above the earthly world and was separated from it by clouds.\n\n\nExpressions\nA pie in the sky is something that is wanted very badly but is unobtainable. \nWhen someone's assumptions or premises concerning a particular subject seem to be radically different from everything you know and recognize about the world, you wonder what color the sky is in their world. \nSimilarly, because the blue hue of the sky during daytime is such a universally observed and understood phenomenon, people say "as sure as the sky is blue" to mean that something is an indisputable fact. \nBlue skies are evoked as a symbol for good times, optimism and emotional peace. \nTo be sky-clad means to be in the nude. \nSimilarly, to go skying is a euphemism for stripping or streaking. \nTo show that there are no limits on what we can discover or accomplish, you can say, "The sky's the limit!" \n"Blue sky thinking" means coming up with a host of ideas without being restricted to what is practical (similar to brainstorming); in particular, an optimistic assumption is made that there will be no obstacles or opposition to implementation of the ideas. \n"The sky is falling" is a common expression that is used when any sort of disaster is occurring. This came from the fable Chicken Little
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On a perfect day , with a very high storm to your front, a very clear sky to your back , the sun about a hour before setting, you could see three complete arcing rainbows stacked one atop the other. They're separate ,but uniform with one another.This is a rarer site, most often you will see 2 or 2 &the legs of the 3rd ...         The sun dogs spoken of are best seen on a clear sunny days with very high thin clouds. You can see 4 orb prisms, about the size of a ping-pong ball held out at arms length, 60degrees to the cloud ,to the north south east &west of the sun.