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A brief moment of hope
By adamg on Thu, 10/26/2023 - 9:36am
Mary Ellen captured a relatively rare morning rainbow, over Millennium Park in West Roxbury.
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Comments
Rare?
Rainbows are most common in early morning and late afternoon. They are more likely when the sun is at a low angle.
Maybe fewer people are up ...
Just seems that people tend to report far more rainbows in the afternoon than morning.
Those damn morning people
keeping secret rainbows all to themselves. I knew they weren't to be trusted.
Morning rainbows are rare...
I learned that right here in the uHub comment section almost exactly a year ago from Ari O.
Summarizing:
The sun needs to shine under a cloud with falling rain to create a rainbow. Since rain generally moves west to east, a clearing after a storm with the sun under it is most likely to happen in the evening, not the morning.
Do read his comment though - which explains it much better and more thoroughly:
https://www.universalhub.com/comment/909469#comment-909469
And, at the risk of being pedantic, rainbows aren't more likely when the sun is at low angle in the sky, they are only possible when it is low (<42°) .
Likelihood
As long as we are being pedantic: more rare does not mean rare (as that excellent analysis points out), and possible is more likely than impossible. More to the point, 42° is not low; at this latitude, the sun never gets higher than about 71°, and at this time of the year it only gets to about 36°, so rainbows are possible all day.
!!
!!
I saw it while going up South
I saw it while going up South Huntington Avenue and Centre Street in JP. Blew my mind... SO COOL!