‘Go outside and look up,’ says photographer who captured a rare quintuple rainbow
Apparently Hurricane Florence left more than destruction in its wake.
As the last of the storm pushed northward over the New Jersey shore two weeks ago, its meteorological leftovers created a rare quintuple rainbow.
And photographer John Entwistle in the Farmingdale area just happened to look up.
“I didn’t know what I was looking at, but I knew it was something special,” he told NJ.com. “The colors were incredible. It didn’t seem real.”
Entwistle posted the photo on social media and was blown away on Tuesday when NASA featured it as its “Astronomy Picture of the Day.” He told NJ.com that he was out on his back deck with his 11-year-old daughter when they saw the rainbow.
“I could be wrong but that sure looks like a quintuple rainbow at sunset tonight over the Jersey Shore, NJ,” Entwistle wrote Sept. 18 on Instagram when he posted the photo.
According to NJ.com, Entwistle is an engineer and hobbyist photographer who keeps a camera close by and hopes his nature photography encourages people to look at the world around them.
“You should go outside and look up,” he told NJ.com.
When NASA shared the photo on its website, it jokingly wrote, “Can your rainbow do this?”
“After the remnants of Hurricane Florence passed over Jersey Shore, New Jersey, USA last month, the Sun came out in one direction but something quite unusual appeared in the opposite direction: a hall of rainbows,” NASA wrote.
“Over the course of a next half hour, to the delight of the photographer and his daughter, vibrant supernumerary rainbows faded in and out, with at least five captured in this featured single shot.”
Supernumerary rainbows only form, NASA explained, “when falling water droplets are all nearly the same size and typically less than a millimeter across. Then, sunlight will not only reflect from inside the raindrops, but interfere, a wave phenomenon similar to ripples on a pond when a stone is thrown in.”
Supernumerary refers to one rainbow — bright and vivid — that appears with “at least two other, less brilliant, rainbows,” according to Live Science.
“In general, supernumeraries are quite common. There are many pictures of two or three supernumeraries,” retired climate scientist Gunther Können told Live Science. “But the appearance in nature of five supernumeraries is exceptional.”
Entwistle posted a couple of photos of the rainbow on his Facebook page, where they’ve drawn hundreds of comments and thousands of wow-faced emoji responses.
“Rainbow Insanity,” he wrote. “My daughter and I watched rainbows fade in and out for a half hour at sunset. Some of the brightest rainbow colors I’ve ever seen in my life!”