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The other day I took this photograph of a thundercloud that moved between myself and the sun. Around the edge of the cloud there were some coloured fringes that I first took to be a variant on a normal rainbow (yes, I know that a rainbow is visible when looking away from the sun). But then I examined the colours more closely and it seems to me that from the cloud, they go orange, red, blue, green. What's going on?

Sunlight colour fringes around a dense thundercloud

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That resembles Goethe's dark spectrum: yellow-magenta-cyan. These are the main colours you see when a narrow shadow is viewed through a prism.

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It could be due to the moisture in the air around the cloud. The moisture would make the light refract much more because it is denser, making the rainbow thinner and leaving yellow and blue out. raindrop

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