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Fundamentals of Remote Sensing

1.4 Did You Know?

"...sorry, no pot of gold at the end of this rainbow..."

...water droplets act as tiny, individual prisms. When sunlight passes through them, the constituent wavelengths are bent in varying amounts according to wavelength. Individual colours in the sunlight are made visible and a rainbow is the result, with shorter wavelengths (violet, blue) in the inner part of the arc, and longer wavelengths (orange, red) along the outer arc.

...if scattering of radiation in the atmosphere did not take place, then shadows would appear as jet black instead of being various degrees of darkness. Scattering causes the atmosphere to have its own brightness (from the light scattered by particles in the path of sunlight) which helps to illuminate the objects in the shadows.