Thanks to images shared on Facebook by amateur photographer Cessna Kutz we can see the quick moment when a “horizontal rainbow” seemed to cover almost the entire Lake Sammamish in Washington State (USA). This phenomenon is known as a horizontal arc or rainbow of fire and it is an atmospheric phenomenon that is worth contemplating.
This phenomenon generates spectacular colored mosaics in the heights.
One of the images shows the rainbow from the photographer’s window around 2:00 p.m. local time and lasted less than five minutes. Of the three images he captured, none of them had a filter applied, he only “adjusted the contrast a little.”
“It almost didn’t look real and honestly these photos are hardly edited. For me, it was a little reminder to hold onto hope and love instead of fear and panic in these unfamiliar times. Stay safe folks,” Kutz wrote in a post on his social network Facebook.
Why are they called rainbows of fire?
Despite its appearance, it is neither a rainbow nor does it have anything to do with fire. It occurs only when the Sun is very high, more than 58 degrees above the horizon. A large, colored band that runs parallel to the horizon forms as sunlight passes through high-altitude cirrus clouds or haze containing plate-shaped ice. When perfectly aligned, the ice crystals act like a prism and refract light in a way that resembles a rainbow, reaching their maximum intensity when the Sun reaches an elevation of about 68 degrees.
