The other night it rained hard, drumming on the corrugated iron roof as we sat at dinner (altogether these days - Heather's persistence paid off). After eating, I went out to enjoy the coolness of the tail end of the storm, and saw a moonlight rainbow.
A similar size and width to daylight rainbows, it appeared opposite the just-past-full moon, which was around 30 degrees above the horizon (the rain clouds were blowing away from the moon). The colours of the rainbow were much fainter, and could only just be made out, but the bow itself was very clear, and seemed to divide the sky into a noticeably lighter interior, and a darker sky outside the arch. Very, very faintly, a second, larger arch could just be made out outside the first, the gap between them being 5-10 times the width of the inner bow (or the width of my hand held at arms length).
None of us had seen or heard of this before, and a quick google suggests they are rare (more common to see moonbows in waterfall spray than after rain) - so it was a stroke of luck to catch this one. An impressive sight, at any rate: but we don't have the right kind of equipment to have photographed it, sorry!
- Mark
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