Rainbows-Daily Reflection 11

Today, I went to the Lincoln Public Library and found two new books on rainbows. They are...



1. The Cloud Spotter's Guide: The Science, History, and Culture of Clouds by Gavin Pretor-Pinney.. and



2. The Rainbow and You by E.C. Krupp



In T.C.S.G (The Cloud Spotter's Guide) it told me that...

• Rainbows fall within the group of optical effects explained by the way sunlight interacts with water droplets by reflecting back toward the observer, who is facing away from the sun.


• The sunlight passes into the raindrops and reflects off the inside of their surfaces and back toward the sun.


• The sunlight's wavelengths are bent at different angles as they pass in and out of raindrops, which has the effect of seperating them. We see the differing wavelegths as different colors when we look at a rainbow.


• The author made up a little poem that tells the fact that no two people see the same rainbow:

Your rainbow is not my rainbow

• It was Alexander of Aphrodisias who first described primary and secondary rainbows in AD200. He said that the faint blue/purple arcs that can appear just inside a bright primary rainbow is called a "supernumerary bow." This bow results from the interference of light waves overlapping when they emerge from different parts of the raindrops.


• Most people think that or draw raindrops in the shape of tears. Raindrops may be perfect little spheres but once they've grown large enough to fall fast,they are greatly distorted by air resistance and are not actually not shaped like spheres at all.


• Raindrops actually look like the top half of hamburger buns.


• Anyone who has seen drops of water fall from the sink, the water drops do actually look like tear drops, but not actual raindrops in the sky.


• When you see drops of water falling from a sink, they extend under their growing weight, clinging with all their might to their surface tension on the faucet, only to lose themselves in the sink below.

That is all the information that I got from that book.

Rainbow and You told me that...

• Some people say that there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but it's never been found. The real treasure of the rainbow is its color.


• Have you ever tried to walk under a rainbow? You can't, and you can't touch it either. That doesn't mean that rainbows aren't real. It just means that they aren't solid. Rainbows are actually light. You can only catch one with your eyes and imagination.


• The rainbow has seven colors-

Red

Orange

Yellow

Green

Blue

Indigo

Purple

• You can remember the colors with sentences such as:

1. Roy-G-Biv: who is known to get his name from the colors of the rainbow.

2. Run Onto Your Gold Before It Vanishes

• The rainbow gets its name from its shape from the weather that makes it happen. Long ago, people thought the rainbow looked like a bow for shooting arrows. Because they saw this bow of color only when it was raining, they called it a rainbow.


• It takes more than rain to make a rainbow. It also takes sunshine. Whenever you look at a rainbow, the sun is behind you. The falling raindrops, in the distance in front of you, are like a movie screen. Sunlight hits the raindrop screen, and the rainbow appears in full color.


• The Acient Greeks noticed the way rainbows come and go and said that the rainbow travels with a messenger from the gods. They called her Iris and said she flies along the rainbow's colorful bridge between heaven and Earth. She magically lifts water from the Earth into the clouds, and it falls as rain.


• The Vikings believed a rainbow bridge connected Asgard, the sky kingdom of the high gods, with Misgard, the earth below. Asgard was supported in the heavens by the branches of World Tree. The god Heimdall guarded the rainbow from giants who lived at the edge of the sky.


• The Navajo of the American Southwest say the Monster Slayer and Born for Water, the twin hero sons of the sun, journeyed to their father's world by stepping onto the rainbow.


• In Siberia, people said that the rainbow was the storm god's bow and with it, he shot arrows of lightning through the sky.


• Australian tribes know the rainbow as the great serpent of the Dreamtime. that was the time, they say, when the world was created.


• In the Bible, the rainbow signals the end of the rain and is God's promise the world will not be destroyed by flood again. Because it takes broken clouds to let the sunlight fall against the rain, rainbows usually do tell us the rain is ending.


• Black and white are not colors. We see black when there is no light, and when there is no light, there is no color. White is just all the colors combined together.


• Isaac Newton is the scientist who discovered the rainbow. He also discovered the law of gravity, which explains why raindrops fall. Newton showed that sunlight is really made up of the rainbow's colors. when those colors are mixed, we call it white light.


• Newton bend the light with a wedge of glass called a prism and made a rainbow out of sunlight in a darkened room. He sent that rainbow through another prism and combined the colors back into white light. That proved the rainbow was in the sunlight.


• Raindrops can spread sunlight into the colors of the rainbow by bending light. Raindrops are water and water can bend light. In the air, all of the colors in the sunlight travel together in the same direction. When they enter the raindrop, the colors seperate as they bend in different directions.


• The back of the raindrop works like a mirror. Inside the raindrop, most of the sunlight is bent and bounced back to the front of the drop, where the light entered.


• By then, the light is aimed back toward the ground in the sun's direction. If you are in the right place, you will see some of that light as a rainbow.


• The world's largest natural arch is the Rainbow Bridge National Monument in Utah.


• By bending and bouncing light, each raindrop makes its own rainbow, but that's not the rainbow you see. One drop makes only a tiny part of the rainbow. It takes millions and billions of raindrops to steer the entire rainbow your way.


• Red in the rainbow comes from raindrops that are higher in the sky and violet in the rainbow comes from raindrops that are lower in the sky.


• Rainbow Facts:

1. Rainbows are always opposite the sun.

2. When the sun is low, the rainbow is high. The higher the sun, the lower the rainbow.

3. The sky is bright inside the rainbow and dark outside.

4. Some rays of light bounce out of the raindrops at other angles, and add white light inside the rainbow.

5. In the winter, the raindrops freeze into snowflakes, and so we get fewer rainbows.

6. Rain forests and rainy tropical islands, like Hawaii, get rainbows more frequently.

• Our world is the only planet in the solar system where rainbows are possible. The sun makes the Earth just the right tempature to have water. If we didn't have water, we wouldn't have rainbows.

That is all the information I got from Rainbow and You by E.C. Krupp. I didn't have any help today except the books because they were informational. That is all the information that I am going to have on rainbows though because I think I have enough and I want to focus on what information I am going to use and how for the final presentation. (:

Rainbows: The Science of Light by Steve Parker (:

I found more information in The Science of Light by Steve Parker. Some of the information was repetitive. The information I found was that:

• The main source of light for our world is the sun.


• Light is a type of energy that we see with our eyes. It is made of electomagnetic radiation.


• If we are in the shadow of a large object we are "in the shade."


• When light waves hit an object, what happens depends on the surface of the object. If the surface is very smooth, shiny, and flat like a mirror, the waves will bounce off. This bouncing back is called reflection. Because of the reflected light, we see an image of the object in the mirror.


• Light changes direction when it hits a new substance.


• When light hits a curved mirror, its rays change direction. It makes the image even bigger and more circluar because the mirror, glass or prism is curved.


• Ordinary white light from a flashlight or the sun is a mixture of all the colors of light.


• When the light of the sun hits raindrops, the light is bent and split into seven different colors. The light is bent again as it exits the raindrop. This is how a rainbow is formed.


• For most people, sight is the most important of our five senses. Light passes through the clear, outer covering of the eye, the cornea. It is then focused by the lens of the eye to form a clear, sharp image on the back of the eyeball, the retina. The retina detects different light colors and sends nerve messages to the brain.


• The way the light rays cross over means that the image is upside down in your eye. However, when we are babies, the brain learns to turn the image the right-side up.


• In 300 B.C.E., Ancient Greeks discussed the nature of light and how it reflects and refracts.
• In 1020, Alhazen said that eyes see by taking in light.
• In 1690, Christiaan Huyguens argued that light is in the form of waves.
• In 1865, James Clerk Maxwell shows that light is a form of combined electricity and magnetism, called electromagnetic energy.

I have found a lot of information from the two new books I got. Most of it was new. I think that I have a lot of information right now and I am going to start thinking about ways to finalize my project in a creative way. This inquiry project was so much fun so far and I know there is more to come. The project and information was interesting. I really liked how we got to pick any subject we wanted. At first, I was a little over-whelmed and didn't really know what topic to do but then rainbows appeared in my mind and I knew I went the right way with what topic I was going to do. (:

Rainbows-Daily Reflection 10

Today I looked more in the Seeing Things: Light by Ann Fullick book. There was more information but not as much as yesterday. The things I learned was that:

• Talking on the phone is one of the many examples of light. Numbers of land-based phones turn our voices into patterns of light traveling across the world at mind-boggling speed. The input of our voices into the phone is changed into an electrical signal, which in turn is converted to impulses of light. This is known as a digital signal.


• These light pulses travel along optical fibers. When they reach their destination, they are converted back into the sounds we hear as we listen to someone talk on the phone. Hundreds and even thousands of messages can travel along the same fiber at the sane time at the speed of light.


• Optical fibers are glass fibers that are thinner than a single human hair. Because the fibers are so thin, the light traveling along it keeps meeting the edges of fiber at a very shallow angle. This means that all of the light is reflected back into the fiber and keeps traveling along it. Optical fibers are somtimes referred to as light pipes. The fiber might be thin enough to make the light bounce off its walls instead of traveling straight through them but the fibers must not be bent too sharply or they may be damaged.


• Optical fibers are used in a medical instrument called an endoscope. This is a bundle of optical fibers with a tiny camera attached. Doctors pass it down the throat into a patient's stomach. The light that passes along the fibers enables doctors to see cleary inside the body without cutting the patient open. This allows them to diagnose conditions such as stomach ulcers and cancer easily and with less risk to the patient.


• SAD or Seasonal Affective Disorder is a type of depression linked to lack of daylight in winter. Sufferers can improve their condition by using a light box that gives out daylight-simulating white light for an hour or two a day.


• As I said before in my previous post, light rays travel in straight lines and cannot be bend around opaque objects. Therefore, no light falls on the surface behind an opaque object in contrast to the area around it, where light does fall. This darkened region is what we call a shadow.


• A small, concentrated light source casts sharp, clear shadows, while a large, spread-out light source makes big, fuzzy shadows.
• Earth's atmosphere is made up of several different gases. These molecules scatter the sun's light as it passes through them. Blue light is scattered more than red light. We cannot look directly into the sun. This means that most of the light that reaches our eyes consists of blue light that has been scattered by the atmosphere. This makes the sky look blue.
• As the sun first rises at dawn, and when it sinks below the horizon at sunset, the light has to travel through more of the atmosphere. The blue light gets scattered so much that only the red, orange, and yellow reaches us so the sky gets its colors.
• When charged particles hit gas particles in the atmosphere colored light is radiated in many wonderful swirling patterns called the Aurora Borealis.
• In 1665, Sir Isaac Newton began to make his series of discoveries about light. The first was that white light could be split into a spectrum of seven colors by a prism. Many of his discoveries were about optics but he did not publish his results until 1704.
• In 1803, Thomas Young proved that light takes the form of waves. His experiments showed that light waves interfer with each other just as water waves do.
• Light is the basic part of our everyday lifes. It allows us to see, it gives everything color and form and it provides us with food, both directly and indirectly.
• Our eyes are complex organs that respond to light and give us a visual picture of the world around us. To explore anywhere, we need light.
• The world around us is full of color and those colors depend on the way different wavelengths of light are reflected and absorbed. Wherever we look, light is vital.

That is all the information I got from Seeing Things: Light by Ann Fullick. I know it seems that most of that information had nothing to do with rainbows. A rainbow is seperated and bent into seven different colors when light bends inside of raindrops, in a one-sentence summary. That book was just what light is and how rainbows are actually a form of light and the book information also showed other ways light works in things other than just rainbows. I didn't really have and or need help from anyone today. I feel excited because I have so much good, fun and interesting information. I am still thinking of ways to share the final presentation and a creative way. Also, I still have another book: The Science of Light by Steve Parker that I will try to find more information on rainbows and light. (:

Rainbows- Daily Reflection 9

Today, during English class, I went to the library to find books on the scientific light part of rainbows. I went on the computer and went onto "Destiny" to find a book. There were a lot of results but I chose two books that I think are going to be really useful. I found:

1. Seeing Things: Light by Ann Fullick and...

2. The Scientific Light by Steve Parker

Information that I found today -(this isn't strictly about rainbows but the light part of it and what light is and how light is helpful to other things too but it coordinates with rainbows because light is a major part of rainbows) This information is from Seeing Things: Light by Ann Fullick:

• Whatever your interests, whether they include sports, reading, computer games, watching TV, or almost anything, light will be important to you.


• Light from the sun is the ultimate source of energy for almost all living things. Life as we know it would be impossible without light. Light also enables us to see things and make sense if the world around us.


• The main natural source of light on Earth is the sun. The sun is immensely hot and the light that comes from it is known as white light. Even though this white light has traveled 93 million miles by the time it reaches us, it still has the power to blind us if we look directly into the sun itself.


• Light travels at the amazing speed of 186,000 miles per second!


• If the sun went out now, we would not know it for another eigth minutes because that is the time it takes light to travel from the surface of the sun to the Earth. After that, it would be very dark and cold and life on Earth would soon cease to exist.


• Light is a form of energy that travels in waves. Unlike sound waves, light waves can travel through a vacuum. This is why light from objects millions of miles away in space can reach Earth.


• Light waves travel in straight lines. They can change direction as they bounce off a solid object or speed up as they pass through different materials. They can also be bent or reflected. It is these properties of light that give it the characteristics we use every day.


• The light we can see is part of electromagnetic waves called the electromagnetic spectrum. These waves all have different wavelengths and this affects how they behave. The visible spectrum, the light we can usually see, is a very tiny part of the whole electromagnetic spectrum which goes from radio waves at one end to gamma rays at the other. The wavelength of visible light ranges from 400 to 700 nanometers. A nanometer is one thousand millionth of a meter, which is very small.


• Vision is one of the most important of the human senses and it is the most relied on of all our other senses.


• Our eyes are adapted to sense the light that reaches us, as it is scattered from everything around us.


• Our eyes not only allow us to see all the things in our surroundings, but also to be aware of what color they are. The eye of a fly is made up of thousands of tiny light-sensing units. Basically, almost all of the eye of a fly is light.


• Light from the objects around us enter through the pupils. The lens of the eye bends that light onto the retina, a light-sensitive layer at the back of your eye. Messages from the retina are transferred to the brain along the optic nerve. In the brain these messages are receieved and interpreted, giving us an image of the world around us.


• The amount of light that comes into the eye is controlled by the iris, the colored ring of muscle around the surrounds the pupil. In dim light, the iris makes the pupil larger letting more light into the eye. If the light is very bright, the pupil gets small, reducing the amount of light that gets into the eye so that it does not damage the retina.
• Because of the way the rays of light direction as they pass through the lens of your eye, the image that forms on the retina of your eye is upside-down. However, you are never aware of this, because your brain has always seen it that way. In fact, if an image of an object is formed on your retina the right way up, you correctly perceive it to be actually upside-down. That basically means that everything we look at is actually upside down but it is so common to the brain that you aren't aware of it so you end up seeing things normally. When things are actually the right way up, you actually see the object to be upside-down.
• Illusions fool our brain and the information we take in. Illusions depend on confusion between the information coming from your eyes and the usual way in which your brain makes sense of that information.
• The rays of light that reflect off objects and arrive at out eyes are spread out. This is different from the light rays that reach us from distant objects. They are traveling in almost parallel lines. The light coming into your eyes passes through the cornea, which bends the light to pass through the pupil. The lens adds some tuning so that the images you see are crisp and clear.
• The reason why you can see objects that are miles away is because light rays travel in straight lines. If they could curve, the light would wander all over the place. Light objects right in front of you might never reach your eyes.
• One thing that storms show us is that light travels faster than sound. Lightning is a huge electric spark traveling between the clouds and the ground.
• Lightning heats the air around it to 54,000 degrees farenheit, making the air expand so fast that it breaks the sound barrier.
• We see the lightning before we hear the thunder. That is because light travels so much faster than sound. Light travels at 983,559,096 feet per second or like I stated before, 186,000 miles per second.
• Sound travels at about 1,080 feet per second depending on the tempature of the air. The farther we are from the storm, the longer it takes for the sound of the thunder to reach us.
• It is claimed that nothing in the universe travels faster than light.
• Light-colored surfaces reflect more light than dark-colored surfaces. This is why a white car parked in the sun will be cooler when you return to it than a black of dark-blue car. White or light-colored clothing will actually keep you cooler on a sunny day.
• Shiny surfaces, whatever color they are, will reflect more light than matte, or nonshiny surfaces.
• Mirrors and other reflective surfaces that are very smooth, will have light bounce off of it cleanly to give a reflected image or a reflection.
• If the surface is shiny but not smooth, light is reflected back at all sorts of unpredictable angles so it will not produce a clear image.
• Reflections are always formed by light bouncing off a shiny solid or a liquid surface.
• Light travels at different speeds in different materials and this is what makes it bend.
• A light ray bends when it enters water, glass, or plastic.
• A rainbow: a wide arc of color in the sky.
• As children are told that there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, there is actually no pot of gold unfortunately because there is no end of a rainbow.
• When a rainbow appears, white light reveals its true colors. Those colors ae the spectrum of light from red to violet.
• White light is made up of light of all the different colors combined together.
• White light can be split up into its different colors using a process in which the light is passed though a special peice of glass called a prism, producing a specturm of all the different colors. This process is called dispersion.
• A prism works by refracting each color by a different amount and bending it at a different angle. The result: the group of a colors are shown in what we know as a rainbow!
• In a rainbow, each tiny droplet of water acts as a prism, splitting the sunlight into the colors that we see arching across the sky.
• We do not see the world in black and white. We see it in a huge range of colors. White light is the light that shines on the world.
• Different colored objects absorb different wavelengths of light and what they do not absorb, the reflect back.
• We have three different types of cone cells on our retinas. They respond to the three primary colors of light- red, blue and green. Mixtures of these the colors of light give us all the colors we can see. That means that everything we see is based on or the mixture of the colors red, green and blue.

There are 52 pages in that book but I just found information up to page 24, because there was already so much information. I am going to read more or maybe even the rest of the book, tonight or at school or after school. I also have The Scientific Light by Steve Parker. I did find a lot of good intersting information today from the book Seeing Things: Light by Ann Fullick.

I did have help today because I reminded myself of Mrs. Doherty's comment yesterday in the library telling me to check Destiny. I used Destiny, as I said before, and got use out of it so thank you. The books were also helpful. I am excited to where this project has taken me and will take me in the future. I am having a lot of fun with it. I just feel like I have to organize my information just a little bit because it is kind of thrown all over my blog: some repitive stuff and sometimes I find information about the wavelengths or white light and then I bring it up again 6 or 7 blog posts later. Other than that, I am really happy with my project. (:

Rainbows-Daily Reflection 8

Today, I tried looking for more rainbow information on different websites. I didn't find more reliable sites and if I did find what I did think was good information, it was repititive. When I came home, I thought about rainbows and I came up with a couple self-to-world connections about rainbows. The first thing I thought was that I remembered I was sitting in my mom's car and it was sunny outside. I remember I closed my eyes and I don't really know how but I could see different colors with my eyes closed, like red and yellow and green and purple and others. I wasn't really educated that much in rainbows before or knew how a rainbow forms and why we sometimes see rainbows. I was thinking,today, that sunlight is made up of the colors of the rainbow:
Red - Orange - Yellow - Green - Blue - Indigo - Violet
The sun was hitting my eyes as they were closed, which I think made me see flashes of color that are in the rainbow. I thought that was interesting because I never would have thought about that before. Another connection that Hannah made me think of was the song: Somewhere Over the Rainbow. That was and still is one of my favorite songs and it reminded me of rainbows, mainly because it has the word rainbows in the title and it cooresponds. Back to my information, I don't think I am going to find any more links on the internet and computer but I was telling Mrs.Doherty about my problem I was having with finding more sources and she told me to look at Destiny to find books about rainbows in the library. I don't think I really gave the books that I had previously a chance so I think I am going to look at them again to try to find more information on rainbows. Today, I feel kind of dissapointed in myself, for not finding information but I did try to find more on the search engine, Google but I didn't want to risk the information being un-accurate. Tommorow I am going to look at some books that might help me. I wanted to share the song: Somewhere over the rainbow. It is from youtube though so if anyone wants to hear it, I suggest listening to it at home: not that it says bad words but I don't know if you can get on youtube at school but it is worth listening to in my opinion and it's about rainbows, which is what I am doing my inquiry project on.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2A2Jt4WOxN8 (:

Rainbows-Daily Reflection 7

Today, I found a new website that gave me information on rainbows. The website is: http://www.deltatech.com/rv/rainbows.html. Most of the information, as I stated a little bit before, is repetitive. It told me that:

• When light and water meet in the sky on a summer's day, for a few moments, a rainbow will appear.
• We cannot follow the arc of a rainbow down below the horizon, because we can't see those raindrops in the air below the horizon. The higher we are above the ground, the more of a rainbow you can see, which explains why when you are looking down at a rainbow from an airplane, you can see it as a complete full circle.
• When a bit of sunlight enters a raindrop, a part of it does not pass directly through the raindrop but is bent from the inner surface and then exits the raindrop. It is bent as both entering and exiting the raindrop.
• This process, repeated for a second time, produces and forms a secondary rainbow, which is the second rainbow and when seen together, the lower one. Since it is bent twice inside the drop and while exiting, the colors of this rainbow are reversed so that the violet is the outer-most color and the red is the inner-most color.

I also looked at another website: http://www.atopics.co.uk.bows.htm/.

On this website, it tells you more about different kinds of rainbows and "fake rainbows" which are just reflections, for example, of a rainbow but not an actual rainbow.

It didn't really give me the kind of information I was looking for but it was helpful and I might look more at it later on in my project. That is all I looked at today.

The only roadblock I had was finding rainbow information that was reliable and accurate. At first, I didn't really know where to look but I went on the computer and found a little more information that was helpful. I feel anxious to learn more a little more about rainbows and I am sure I will. (:

Rainbows- Daily Reflection 6 and where I am so far (:

I admit that today I didn't really look at any information on rainbows today. Today when I got home, I got prepared to share with my classmates some information about rainbows and why Ichose the topic. I used my blog posts as a guidline and I tried finding information that was interesting but not too interesting because I wanted to share that in a bigger presentation but I wanted my classmates to also think that rainbows were interesting and not boring so I worked to the best of my ability to find information I thought would suit my "mini presentation" in a good way. So far, I have multiple sources such as:
1. World Book Online
2. Rainbows by David Whitfield
3. http://www.theoi.com/
4. http://science.howstuffworks.com/
5. http://www.ipl.prg/
I also have a mind-blowing amount of information on rainbows that are super interesting. I keep trying to find new information and sources but most of the information I find is repetitive, which is a good thing, as Mrs. Doherty was telling the class this morning. As much as I think I have good information, I want to try to find more about rainbows. That is where I stand in this inquiry project. (: