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The whole system composed by the Sun's rays, the observer's head, and the (spherical) water drops has an axial symmetry around the axis through the observer's head and parallel to the Sun's rays. The rainbow is curved because the set of all the raindrops that have the right angle between the observer, the drop, and the Sun, lie on a cone ...
Light rays coming from the zenith take the shortest-possible path (1 ⁄ 38) through the air mass, yielding less scattering. Light rays coming from the horizon take the longest-possible path through the air, yielding more scattering. [11] The blueness is at the horizon because the blue light coming from great distances is also preferentially ...
Light rays enter a raindrop from one direction (typically a straight line from the Sun), reflect off the back of the raindrop, and fan out as they leave the raindrop. The light leaving the raindrop is spread over a wide angle, with a maximum intensity at 40.89–42°.
In physics, ray tracing is a method for calculating the path of waves or particles through a system with regions of varying propagation velocity, absorption characteristics, and reflecting surfaces. Under these circumstances, wavefronts may bend, change direction, or reflect off surfaces, complicating analysis.
Ray tracing of a beam of light passing through a medium with changing refractive index.The ray is advanced by a small amount, and then the direction is re-calculated. Ray tracing works by assuming that the particle or wave can be modeled as a large number of very narrow beams (), and that there exists some distance, possibly very small, over which such a ray is locally straight.
Rays hitting the particle undergoes reflection, refraction and diffraction. These rays exit in various directions with different amplitudes and phases. Such ray tracing techniques are used to describe optical phenomena such as rainbow of halo on hexagonal ice crystals for large particles.
[3] [4] Rippling caustics are commonly formed when light shines through waves on a body of water. Another familiar caustic is the rainbow . [ 5 ] [ 6 ] Scattering of light by raindrops causes different wavelengths of light to be refracted into arcs of differing radius, producing the bow.
The optical path difference between the paths taken by two identical waves can then be used to find the phase change. Finally, using the phase change, the interference between the two waves can be calculated. Fermat's principle states that the path light takes between two points is the path that has the minimum optical path length.