I saw the end of a rainbow! It was right by me!

[Hopefulatlunchtime]

I did not think this was possible! Being as rainbows are optical illusions I always thought they looked far away, but this one was really, really close and I could see the end of it, right by me as I drove past, at the edge of some local woods. I could not stop on the road I was on to get out and run to it.

Which has me thinking. If I had, what would have happened? Would it have always looked a bit further away or could I have actually walked into it? Or would it have disappeared as I got close to it?

Does anyone know?

I was once in an orchard full of small rainbows, it was magical, I could see my dad standing at the bottom of the rainbow, but to him it seemed just out of his grasp, same for me,
it only lasted momentarily

Really?! Say more about that...

They are rare but you can sometimes see genuine full size circular rainbows from aircraft.

FWIW it's more common to see a small circular coloured rings, similar looking to rainbows, around aircraft shadows projected on cloud tops...those are known as Glories

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow#Full-circle_rainbow

An illusion is something that isn't what it seems, or is something that isn't what it looks like.

Rainbows are real. They're white light passing through a prism (water droplets) which diffracts (splits) that white into its component parts (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet). You are seeing white light split into its components: you're seeing something that is actually real, actually exists, is actually happening.

https://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/climate-weather/atmospheric/rainbows-are-circular.htm

I’ve edited my post

As with any rainbow, no matter how close it seems it would appear to keep moving away as you approached it.

This actually happened to me when I was driving on a motorway, the end of the rainbow stayed a few feet in front of me for ages.

And this

https://www.weatherandradar.co.uk/weather-news/can-you-reach-the-end-of-a-rainbow--da4e4dd5-d118-49af-af67-b402fcd9736b

I started to type my understanding of it but then realised Google would do a far better job than I ever could 😁

I drove through one once. It was unbelievable. It lasted for ages. I was with someone else so I know it happened!

A couple hundred yards from where I was stood.

Leprechaun pic or it didn't happen!

I once had one end on the bonnet of my car as I drove along for a bit . I got quite excited but no sign of anything exciting!

But what you didn't notice at the time was that as you got nearer, the whole thing was shifting in relation to you. Which is why it seemed like it was static.

I was also driving and the bonnet of my car appeared to go into a rainbow and stay there a while.

Have you ever had one of those crystal pendant things that you hang in the window and it makes rainbows on the wall? You know how sometimes you walk past them in just the right spot so you get a flash of coloured light straight in your eye? Imagine walking through a room with 5000 of them hanging from the ceiling - as you walked around you would see loads of different coloured flashes coming from different places. The coloured light is real - as white light hits the crystal it gets split up into different colours, and the coloured beams travel outwards to your eye - but it's not 'in' the crystal, you're not going to pick one up that's full of green light.

Rain is kind of like being surrounded by a forest of tiny crystals like that. Because there's billions of droplets (and also because they're spherical, not faceted like crystals) you don't see individual flashes but the sum of loads and loads of tiny ones, which looks like a multicoloured arc. As you move through the rain you'll again see the flashes coming from different places, but because of the shape of the droplets and their huge number it won't be chaotic flashing like in a room full of crystals - it'll just look like the whole rainbow is moving steadily away from you. In a similar way though, it's not like there's light 'in' the raindrops that you can walk up to and stand in.

@Hopefulatlunchtime I've no idea but I would love a lot of gold right now.