I have this habit of reading British newspapers online since the day I've come back from United Kingdom in February. Yesterday was no different. If you are a gossip lover stop reading Mumbai Mirror, Mid-Day and start reading British news papers. Among all these unwanted gossip news, there was one rare article that stood out. It was about an 'Upside Down Rainbow'.

Here is the article that followed;

Astronomer Dr Jacqueline Mitton captured the freak rainbow near her home in Cambridge. Normal rainbows are made when light penetrates raindrops and re-emerges out the other side in the same direction. But, the inverted types, known as circumzenithal arcs, are caused when sunlight bounces off ice crystals high in the atmosphere, sending the light rays back up.

"The conditions have to be just right: you need the right sort of ice crystals and the sky has to be clear," said Mitton. "We're not sure how big an area it was visible over, but it was certainly very impressive," she added. A spokesman for the Met Office confirmed the inverted rainbows are occasionally spotted in British skies. "It is convex to the sun and is formed by refraction in suitably-oriented ice crystals and may show vivid rainbow colouring, as in this case," he said.

There was also this e-mail forward I got from one of my friends last evening. The forward talked about a rare rainbow called the 'Fire Rainbow', also called circumhorizontal arc being caught on film last week. But a little googling and a little research told me that it was caught on film alright but it was on June 3, 2006 in Northern Idaho and not last week as claimed by the e-mail. Given below is the picture of that beautiful natural phenomenon.


Clouds have to be cirrus, at least twenty thousand feet in the air, with just the right amount of ice crystals and the sun has to hit the clouds at precisely 58 degrees from the observer.

Well, we all know about the strange ways of nature. The fire rainbow looks like a canvas coloured by God himself and the upside down rainbow looks as though the nature is smiling with happiness.