Have you ever seen a quadruple rainbow????

Rainbows are one of nature's little gifts after a shower or storm that can quickly bring a smile to your face. Many people have seen these beautiful arcs grace the sky with their presence, and several people have likely seen double rainbows as well, even though they are far less frequent. But what about a triple or even a quadruple rainbow? Many in the scientific community long believed that they were as real as the lost city of Atlantis. But believe it or not, recent photographic evidence has proved that triple and quadruple rainbows are very real.... and very rare!

A new meteorological model has allowed meteorologists to find and capture the extremely rare phenomenon known as a tertiary, or triple, rainbow. And very recently, an amateur storm chaser in Germany went even farther and found and captured the exceptional event of a quaternary, or quadruple, rainbow. You will find his picture below. Sightings of tertiary (triple) rainbows are incredibly rare. In fact, there have only been 5 reported instances in the past 250 years! But with this new method on hand, two photos have come to light in the past few months - both showing the tertiary band and one revealing the first-ever photographed quaternary band.

The first picture ever of a quadruple rainbow shows the third-order (left) and fourth-order (right) rainbows. The first two aren't included in the image.

Now you may ask yourself, where do these unique rainbow form. The answer, look where you'd least expect! Imagine yourself in an open field, seeing the bright primary and secondary rainbows before you. To see the tertiary and quaternary rainbows, you need to look back towards the sun, about 40 degrees towards it.

Like the primary and secondary rainbows, the third and fourth order bands occur when sunlight bends as it moves through water, a process known as refraction. The curvature of raindrops within storms helps to bend the colors in sunlight at slightly different angles, dispersing them and separating them into the familiar red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet bands of a rainbow. Most often, the multicolor bands pass right through the raindrops, but when they are reflected, they produce a primary rainbow at approximately 138 degrees from the sun. Double rainbows occur when some of the sunlight is reflected back through the raindrops and the process is repeated. However, each time the process is repeated, the resulting rainbow is fainter, which makes the tertiary and quaternary rainbows so rare.

However, the conditions to see these rare rainbows are very tricky to find. You need an pitch black sky behind the rainbows (in order to see them), you need direct sunlight, so there needs to be a break in the clouds letting the sun in (or you'll have no rainbow at all!), and it also helps to have torrential rainfall occurring. Then, you may also have to enhance the contrast of the picture enough so that the rainbow can be seen with the naked eye. It's that tricky.

But if you ever find yourself in this perfect set up and you have a camera along, be on the lookout for these elusive rainbows. The results may just take your breath away!