Quinary rainbow in lamplight, plus a twisted primary and nice supernumeraries

In my last blogpost, I described how tertiary and quaternary rainbows in the light of a halogen lamp and made by drops from a spray bottle can be photographed. The quinary rainbow I had not been able to detect back then, so I gave it another try two weeks later (on April 14^th, 2018).

I chose a more conventional wide angle lens with f = 18 mm (Pentax DA 18-55 mm at a Pentax K-5 camera) instead of a fisheye this time, so that both the peak illumination intensity and the drops can be confined to a specific rainbow sector without the need to care about the rest of the rainbow circumference. Also, I hoped that a lens hood (which cannot be applied to a fisheye objective) might help somewhat against the wetting of the front lens by drifting drops. However, this did not work out, and the wetting problem did in fact worsen due to the fact that the lens has now to be pointed upward to capture the upper sections of the rainbows against the sky. This creates a much more efficient target for falling drops.

I started with a nice shot of a primary and secondary rainbow against the night sky, which might be mistaken as a lunar rainbow at first glance – but, as mentioned, both illumination and drops were purely artificial:

(10 s, f/3.5, ISO 400)

I then took about 40 pictures, both upwards as well as pointed horizontally to the right side against the vegetation background, without any additional polarizers. A signature of the quinary rainbow appeared in only a single frame of this whole series, recorded shortly after the one shown above. I suppose that even wiping the front less does not help to much after a while, as the lens will fog up again shortly afterwards. The diffuse background resulting from even a slightly fogged lens might be enough to mask the quinary. For the next experiment I plan to install a small battery-powered hairdryer or something of that sort to keep the lens dry. Anyway, here is the picture:

(1 s, f/3.5, ISO 1600)

with increased contrast and saturation:

The arrow points to the green/blue stripe of the quinary rainbow inside Alexander’s dark band.

Ironically, I had taken this only as a fun shoot because of the twisted look of the primary, and did certainly not expect it to be the only reference image for the quinary from this series. At the location of the dark band crossing the primary, the shadow of the spray bottle was cast on the drop cloud, which suppressed part of its “rainbow response”. The remaining drops outside the shadow might have had a different size, and/or the remaining divergence of the light source did play a role. Even at a distance of 10 m from the lamp, a lateral displacement of a drop by 50 cm corresponds to a shift in the lamp position (as seen by this drop) of about 3°. So the deviation of the Minnaert cigar (which has more of an apple shape here) from an ideal cone will still have an appreciable influence. This can only be reduced by increasing the distance to the light source or by confining the drop cloud to a region closer to the camera.

As already mentioned in the last blogpost, and being also visible in the picture above, beautiful supernumeraries at both the primary and secondary rainbows can become visible for several seconds. Finally, here are several pictures that show more of their variety:

(2 s, f/3.5, ISO 200)

(2 s, f/3.5, ISO 400)

(2 s, f/3.5, ISO 100)