This week’s photo challenge is “curves”.  I’ve been waiting for an excuse to share some rainbow shots and thought this was the opportunity to do so!

The above rainbow was taken last week from the pier in Bar Harbor, Maine.   A rainbow’s colors are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.  And I can see them all too!

The picture below is in the moments before the rainbow dissolved away.  You might want to double click and blow it up so you can see it better – there are vertical lines up and down the rainbow as it fades away.  I’ve never seen how a rainbow disappears, so when I edited the pictures and saw that, I loved it.

Seeing a rainbow disappearing is really cool, but so is a double rainbow.  I took the below pictures last year from the windows of my employer.  According to Wikipedia, when a double rainbow occurs, it is always on the outside of the primary rainbow and its colors are reversed.  I’m sure there’s a scientific explanation for it, but I was happy to click quickly enough with my iPhone to capture their fleeting beauty.

The left rainbow was from the windows in front of my desk, which faces north.  The right rainbow was taken around the corner, from windows that face east.  As you can see, the rainbow was HUGE!  It’s a bit harder to see the colors, although the east view on the right is better defined, probably because the sun was setting in the west when I took this.  The rainbow at Bar Harbor was much shorter, but wider, so the colors are better seen.

These are the only two times I was fast enough to capture a rainbow before it vanished.  I’m happy to have gotten what I did and to be able to share their gracious curves in the sky.

The Bible tells us that the rainbow was set in the heavens as a reminder that never again would the waters become a flood to destroy all life.  Seeing them is a reminder to thank God for his promises – not just this one, but any promise that is working in your life at the moment.

It’s also a reminder of beauty, the mysterious, the ethereal skies, and the longings of our hearts that cannot be easily explained.  The author Nora Roberts offers this thought for us to consider:

Magic exists. Who can doubt it,
when there are rainbows and wildflowers,
the music of the wind and the silence of the stars?
Anyone who has loved has been touched by magic.
It is such a simple and such an extraordinary part
of the lives we live.
― Nora Roberts

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