09/01/2026
There are three separate things happening in this sky, and most people only ever notice one of them.
Ballast Point Park, Tampa, on a July evening. Forty-four minutes earlier I had been standing on this same pier photographing a lightning strike over downtown. Then the storm moved off, the sun dropped behind me, and this went up over the bay.
Start with the obvious one. The bright inner arch is the primary rainbow. Sunlight enters each raindrop, bends, bounces once off the back wall, and bends again coming out, and that path sends light back to you in a cone about 42 degrees wide.
Now look higher, at the second fainter arch above it.
That is the secondary bow, and it is made by light that bounced twice inside the drop instead of once. The extra bounce does two things. It pushes the bow out to about 51 degrees, which is why it sits farther from center. And it flips the color order. Look closely and you will see it. On the primary, red is on the outside. On the secondary, red is on the inside. The two arches are mirror images of each other, and once you know to check, you can never look at a double rainbow again without checking.
The second bounce also costs light, which is why the outer arch is always the dimmer one. Some of the light escapes at each reflection instead of continuing.
Now the part almost nobody sees.
Look at the sky between the two arches. Then compare it to the sky just inside the bright bow. The strip between them is noticeably darker. That is not the storm and it is not the edit. It is a real, named feature called Alexander band, and a Greek philosopher named Alexander of Aphrodisias wrote it down around the year 200.
Here is why it is dark. Light that bounces once inside a drop cannot come back at an angle wider than about 42 degrees. Light that bounces twice cannot come back at an angle narrower than about 51 degrees. So the ring of sky between those two numbers receives almost nothing from either path. Every other part of the sky is getting scattered sunlight. That band is not. You are looking at a gap in the physics, roughly nine degrees wide, sitting in the air over Tampa Bay.
Those dark spokes fanning across the middle of the frame are shadows. Broken clouds behind me blocked the low sun in places, and those shadow columns are running out through the falling rain. They look like they converge because they are close to parallel and receding away from you, the same reason a straight road appears to narrow. They are pointing at the same spot the rainbow is centered on.
A primary bow, a secondary with its colors reversed, Alexander band between them, and cloud shadows across all of it. One sky, one shutter click, and the pier for scale.
This one prints as a panorama, which is worth mentioning because panoramas solve a wall that nothing else fits. Above a sofa. Over a headboard. The long wall of a conference room where a square print always looks lost. It came off a fifty megapixel camera, so it holds detail at widths most files cannot survive. Message me with your wall measurement and I will tell you the size that works.
📍 Ballast Point Park, Tampa, Florida.
