Tertiary Rainbow

36 years ago, my father-in-law needed to undergo a risky operation. The whole family was really worried about it. It was raining that afternoon where we lived when he was scheduled for the surgery and I saw a rainbow in the sky. I ran inside to get my camera, but it had faded before I could get a picture. However, high up in the sky, was an upside-down rainbow and I snapped a picture of it. We took the rainbow "smile" to be a good omen. I don't know if it mattered or not, but my father-in-law came through his surgery with flying colors.

About nine years ago, I came across an article that showed the first verified picture of a tertiary rainbow. The article said that they were extremely rare and, since then, only a couple of more have been recorded. It took me several hours of digging through shoe-boxes full of photos, but I finally found it. It's a color print from a 35mm negative (which I haven't found yet), taken with a Canon Epoca camera*. The photo shown below has been scanned at 300 dpi:

I uploaded this to EarthSky, since they seem to be interested in rainbows, but it didn't get accepted. I'm not sure what to do with it, so I thought I would post it here.

[Added] I've tweaked the brightness and contrast a bit to bring out the colors a bit more:

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*Epoca Camera - This was a bit of an oddball camera that was the best 35mm point-and-shoot I ever owned. If it hadn't died on me, I would still be using it today.

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