Can you reach the end of the rainbow?

Can you reach the end of the rainbow?

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Sadly, you'll never get to taste that rainbow after looking at it with your mouth and you'll never get the little gold pot from a green Irish guy.

You will also never be able to cross a rainbow, as high as Dorothy sang.

Sorry - while I'm here bursting the bubble, I can also tell you that you can't get to the horizon!

Why can't you reach the end of the rainbow?

Simply put, because the rainbow is really an optical illusion, not a physical or tangible thing.

Rainbows are formed by raindrops that act like tiny prisms.

Raindrops refract and reflect inside sunlight toward you as you look at them.

Different wavelengths of light refract at different angles, so the white light of the sun is broken down into an ordered set of the giant arc colors you see in a rainbow.

So with this in mind, it makes a lot of sense that as you move towards the rainbow, the angles you're viewing it will change.

The rainbow will always be this distance away.

In order for the colors of the rainbow to be visually created, the water droplets must be a certain distance away from you.

As you approach the rainbow it will always be about equal distance from you, so you will never be able to reach it.

For the rainbow to remain constant, the angle between the sun, the drop, and the observer should be 42 degrees.

If you can't cross the rainbow, how do people take pictures from the plane?

Now, as I mentioned above, you will also never be able to cross a rainbow.

However, there are still photos taken by the people on the plane about them flying over the rainbow.

This is another optical illusion and it involves airplane windows that have birefringent properties.

Birefringence is the optical property of light being split into two rays when viewed through a material, both rays with their colors also being dispersed differently.

So when you look, the light shining from the airplane window to your eyes, the two rays of light that interfere with each other create bands of color, similar to what one would see when looking at a rainbow.

This effect is also enhanced by the polarization effect of water as a light reduction reaction.

In short, you can't cross a rainbow, and you certainly can't go to its end.