Image: Patrick Emerson

Remember spotting a rainbow as a child and feeling the sudden urge to jump up and down, point and shout: “Look, a rainbow!” Well, the following pictures of semicircular, double or sunset rainbows might make you do just that. In any case, if this were a rainbow beauty pageant, they’d all be perfect tens. So heed this warning that extreme beauty will follow and scroll with care!

A double sunset rainbow in McFall, Missouri, spanning a lone tree:

Image: Carl S.

Silicon Valley is rarely as beautiful as it is with this sunset rainbow:

Image: Steve Jurvetson

An island in the Maldives spanned by an almost semicircular rainbow:

Image: muha

A perfectly clear primary rainbow, reflected in the water, with a secondary rainbow above as photographed in Kansas:

Image: Patrick Emerson

An illuminated rainbow in Serrieres in the canton of Neuchatel, Switzerland. The picture looks a bit unreal because it was taken with HDR technique:

Image: Tambako the Jaguar