Rainbow in a fountain

Last week, we went to Riga, the capital of Latvia. Riga has many beautiful parks. In one of these parks, we saw a rainbow closest as you can get! A channel was going trough the park and in that channel, there was a huge fountain. Since the day was very warm and sunny, we saw a beautiful rainbow right in that fountain!

We asked our mom to tell us, how it is possible for a rainbow to come in the fountain. We had seen a rainbow in the sky before, but this was something different.

Our mom told us that a rainbow is made by the sun-light bouncing back to us from the insides of raindrops. Ordinary light, like that from a light bulb or from the Sun, is called white light. White light is actually a mixture of seven colors. Light bends, when it passes through water. Each color bends a different amount. When white light enters a raindrop, the colors get separated. The white light splits into seven colors that we saw in that fountain. These seven colors always appear in the same order: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo (bluish-purple), and violet (purple). Now we know that it is not always necessary to have dark clouds and bright sunlight for seeing a rainbow.