It hasn’t happened often, but there are times when I’ve been lucky enough to be outside while something cool was going on up in the sky.
One rainy day revealed the biggest rainbow I had every seen poking through some dark clouds, while one lucky night saw me gaze upon a supermoon I wasn’t prepared for.
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And really, those are the kinds of unusual natural events I’d prefer to be anywhere near. I may get some kind of bragging rights out of saying I made it through the largest hail storm the world has ever seen, but I wouldn’t want a house full of bowling ball-sized holes.
Fortunately, some British residents were treated to a sight that’s about as rare, but not quite as destructive over the weekend.
Thanks to how the internet works, most of us have at least seen a photo of a double rainbow.
As meteorologist Mike Pigott told ABC News, these form when sunlight bends and then reflects off the internal “walls” of the same raindrops twice.
Apparently, this phenomenon is at its most visible when the sun is behind you at a low angle and the rain is in front of you.
Although it’s rare, it’s also possible for a lightning strike to occur right as a rainbow is visible.
According to the BBC , this can often happen during a localized storm when there’s enough of an electrical charge to produce lightning in the sky, but also when brief sunny periods occur between rain storms.
For those watching the skies in Britain over the weekend, these conditions seemed to show up at the perfect time.
And so, not only was the storm localized and sporadic enough for lightning to strike while a rainbow was visible, but the sun was low enough in the sky at the time for a double rainbow to form all at once.
I don’t even want to think about the chances of all of that happening at once.
And this rare phenomenon was visible in more than one place, as “weather watchers” who go by Crezz1993 and Benc04c happened to snap some impressive photos of it in the English towns of Hednesford and Dudley, respectively.
And so, we can all have an idea as to what happens when two rare natural displays show up at once.
And it looks just as beautiful as it does chaotic. Good luck predicting when something like this will happen again!
h/t: BBC
