Double rainbow delights Mount Pleasant

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Meghan Dondzila was enjoying a slice of meatloaf with her roommates when it happened.

Suddenly, she said, a beautiful arrangement of light was visible through a window near the dinner table. It was a double rainbow.

She and her roommates quickly realized they were witnessing the phenomenon recently made popular by a viral YouTube video in which a man recorded his emphatic reaction to the sighting of such a rainbow.

The Walled Lake junior said Monday night’s double rainbow was intense.

“We were saying things like, ‘Oh, a double a rainbow, oh my god,’ using the over-excitement of the guy from the video,” Dondzila said. “We were all like, ‘What does this mean!?’ I feel like everybody who saw the video probably did that.”

She could hear people from the neighboring Deerfield Village apartments talking about the double rainbow from her apartment in Lexington Ridge.

When it comes to the experience on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being absolutely life changing, Dondzila said her first double rainbow sighting was a seven or eight.

The double rainbow stretched all the way across the sky, even visible from Nick Alsup’s Copper Beech apartment.

“It was majestic,” the Clio sophomore said. “It made me think that there would be two pots of gold on the other side.”

While Alsup did not experience any sort of overwhelming emotional reaction to the rainbow, he said the rainbow itself was awesome.

A lot of people at Copper Beech were talking and singing about the show in the sky, he said.

“My neighbors were freaking out pretty bad,” he said. “From my front door, I could see about 50 people.”

Not uncommon

Despite the reaction to the double rainbow from Alsup and Dondzila’s neighbors, Marty Baxter, assistant professor of meteorology, said it’s not unheard of to see the simultaneous appearance of two rainbows.

“It’s less common than seeing an individual rainbow, but it’s not uncommon,” he said. “These have always been out there, but now people are noticing them because of the YouTube thing.”

Baxter said rainbows require bright sunlight and water droplets to form. The light hits the water and is reflected inside the drops, which act like a prism. The light is bent at a particular angle, causing the rainbow to have it’s common arc shape.

In order to witness a double rainbow, Baxter said, dark clouds generally have to be in the sky, providing a dark backdrop that contrasts the fainter second rainbow.

“What’s happening is the light is being reflected not once inside the drops, but twice,” he said. “The double rainbow is going to be fainter and the colors are actually reversed if you look closely.”