All the Colours of the Rainbow Except Pink

Recently, on a car journey, three friends and I saw a spectacular rainbow which set us all talking. Despite the considerable combined wisdom of the group, none of us could fully explain the phenomenon we we're seeing, and I was left to waiting to research it, when I got home. A good explanation of rainbows can be found here but as Wikipedia explains:

A rainbow does not actually exist at a particular location in the sky. It is, instead, an optical phenomenon whose apparent position depends on the observer's location and the position of the sun. All raindrops refract and reflect the sunlight in the same way, but only the light from some raindrops reaches the observer's eye. This light is what constitutes the rainbow for that observer.

And so each person is seeing their own different rainbow! On a related note, I came across a very interesting article on why magenta isn't a colour. From Null Hypothesis:

A beam of white light is made up of all the colours in the spectrum. The range extends from red through to violet, with orange, yellow, green and blue in between. But there is one colour that is notable by its absence. Pink (or magenta, to use its official name) simply isn’t there. But if pink isn’t in the light spectrum, how come we can see it?

A good question and the article provides the answer. Isn't perception just crazy? And isn't the scientific explanation so much more interesting than the religious?