Atmospheric
Optics
Marin County Fogbow
Imaged by Bernhard Bach of the University of Nevada, Reno while walking the Pacific Coast Trail, in the Marin Headlands, just across the Golden Gate bridge from San Francisco.
©Bernhard Bach, shown with permission
Scroll right for full panorama.
Computed fogbows (from IRIS) for different drop sizes.
The theory used is exact and follows directly from the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell's pioneering equations (1860s) describing classical electromagnetism.
This fogbow came from small droplets with some diversity of size.
Fogbows - diffraction challenged rainbows - broaden and lose more and more colour as the droplets forming them get smaller.
