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What is the order of colors in a rainbow?
Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet are the colors of
the rainbow,
but these are not necessarily the sequence of colors that an observer
might see.
Rainbows are formed when raindrops reflect sunlight. As sunlight
enters the drops,
the different wavelengths of the colors that compose sunlight are
refracted at
different lengths to produce a spectrum of color. Each observer
sees a different set
of raindrops at a slightly different angle. Drops at different
angles from the observer
send different wave lengths (i.e. different color) to the observer's
eyes. Since the
color sequence of the rainbow is the result of refraction, the color
order depends
on how the viewer sees this refraction from the viewer's angle of
perception.