When New Scientist featured an interesting picture of a rainbow on the Moon, perhaps they thought that people would care. They didn’t, you see the Moon rainbow was actually an optical artifact that was produced by their arrangement of cameras and filters. It was a rainbow on a photograph not a rainbow on the Moon.
NASA explained:
“Because each filter observes different pieces of the ground at different times, it observes the opposition surge at a slightly different time. When the observations from separate filters are combined to a single color image, this shifting bright spot is seen as a rainbow.
The analysts at NASA thought it looked pretty cool, but that was about it – until a very special commenter jumped in. Cage fighter and rainbow lover extraordinaire Yosemite Bear, known as Paul Vasquez to some and Double Rainbow Guy to the rest of the planet, had this to say:
So this could never be soon by the naked eye because it took several cameras to compose it but of course it’s on the dark side of the moon and naked eyes would never see it any way so my reaction is that’s cool and fun and people should just enjoy rainbows however they come!
So he’s not raining on NASA’s rainbow parade, but let’s get some perspective here by looking at what he said and what he did say. He called it “cool” and “fun”, but he never once asserted that he didn’t know what it means, he made no mention as to how far it extended and he was not reduced to a weeping mess by the mere site of it. I get the feeling that Yosemitebear, if it was in fact him, was just being nice.
If he really liked it, the response should have gone something like this:
