Double Rainbow

It’s been raining here in LA.

A lot.

But I love it. Let everyone else complain. Having grown up in Southern California I see water falling from the sky as either a Hollywood special effect or some kind of crazy miracle where God says “Hey, you know that stuff that comes through your faucet if you pay your bills? I can produce it out of thin air, no charge.”

Rain is pure, cleansing. It makes the flowers grow.

And if you’re very patient, it can play with the sunlight to give you this:

After five days of rain, the sun broke through the clouds late Wednesday to create a brilliantly lit full rainbow arch. As it grew brighter and brighter, a second one formed above it. That's right ... double rainbow.

Twitter blew up with thousands of tweets from across LA calling out the spectacular spectrumed duo. But I think the wittiest notation came from LeVar Burton, who quipped “The very elusive Double Reading Rainbow… http://twitpic.com/3ij4r4”

Even with my 24mm lens, the double rainbow was too big to capture in one shot, so I took a panning series of four and spliced them into this panorama in Photoshop.

I counted my lucky stars that I had my 5D with me, as earlier this year another radiant rainbow showed up in the exact same spot, and all I had was my point-n-shoot. Still, I think I put together a pretty fun composite of the shots. Here’s the one from February (see more shots in my post from February 10, 2010).

So, double rainbow. To borrow from the YouTube guy, “What does it mean?”

I prefer to think that here in the advent of Christmas, God is reminding us that he fulfills promises.