Quadruple rainbow photo goes viral, and it's real
Tuesday, April 21, 2015, 3:34 PM - Long Island commuter Amanda Curtis snapped a photo of a quadruple rainbow early Tuesday morning while waiting for her train. What happened next was a lesson in going viral.
“I didn’t have much time, my train was coming, but I knew it was pretty spectacular,” she said in a phone interview with The Weather Network. “People really responded to it.”
Quadruple #Rainbow at #glencove ny @LIRR station Today will be 4 pots of #gold #lucky #chasetherainbow #aprilshowers pic.twitter.com/4YUUveJuy6
— Amanda Curtis (@amanda_curtis) April 21, 2015Some have been skeptical of the miraculous sight, however, saying the image may have been altered somehow.
@XelaEpop looks like a double exposure of the same 2 rainbows. You can see the circular angle path of the 2nd pair is way off
— Dave Patrick (@wwxchaser) April 21, 2015@weathernetwork colours faded weird, almost looks like a long exp photo with a nd filter and rainbow shifting positions.
— S Sills (@SpencerSills) April 21, 2015
Weather Network meteorologists expressed doubt about the positioning of the rainbows, saying typically rainbows appear in concentric rather than overlapping rings, as in this image of a double rainbow in Ottawa captured by viewer Arlene Lang:
However, Paul Neiman, a research meteorologist at NOAA’s Earth System Research Observatory, told Capital Weather Gang the third and fourth rainbows could have been caused by a "phantom sun" - in this case, the sun's reflection on the waters of Oyster Bay, located about three kilometres from the train station where Curtis snapped the pic.
For her part, Curtis says she only increased the contrast in the original image to bring out the individual rainbows more clearly.
“I could see all four rainbows with the naked eye,” she said.
