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Single Light Ray Refracting Inside a Raindrop

David Ding on 4 Dec 2024
Latest activity Reply by David Ding on 10 Dec 2024

I am inspired by the latest video from YouTube science content creator Veritasium on his distinct yet thorough explanation on how rainbows work. In his video, he set up a glass sphere experiment representing how light rays would travel inside a raindrop that ultimately forms the rainbow. I highly recommend checking it out.
In the meantime, I created an interactive MATLAB App in MATLAB Online using App Designer to visualize the light paths going through a spherical raindrop with numerical calculations along the way. While I've seen many diagrams out there showing the light paths, I haven't found any doing calculations in each step. Hence I created an app in MATLAB to show the calculations along with the visualizations as one varies the position of the incoming light ray.
Demo video:
https://youtu.be/t4G6Tpl08Jc?si=7vPsrPJlRRht5MsN
For more information about the app and how to open it and play around with it in MATLAB Online, please check out my blog article:
https://www.davidyding.com/navPages/Rainbow

4 Comments

Muhammad
Muhammad on 10 Dec 2024
That is amazing thing dear david
Adam Danz
Adam Danz on 9 Dec 2024
Very cool David!
David Ding
David Ding on 10 Dec 2024
Thank you Adam! Glad you liked it!
Image Analyst
Image Analyst on 5 Dec 2024
Reminds me of the very first homework problem I got when I enrolled at the College of Optics at the University of Arizona. It asked us to compute the angle between you and the sun when you are seeing a rainbow. All we had was Snell's law and the index of refraction. I think the answer was around 42 degrees or so if I remember correctly (it was 43 years ago after all).

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