When light rays, visible solar radiation blasting through our atmosphere and off of everything around us, hit water droplets, they get bent and refract due to the change in density. Because the water droplets are made of water, the light refracts a second time, this being a well known phenomena. Remember the oar and the canoe, or the spoon and the clear glass of water, how the ear appears broken under the water's surface, and the spoon looks to embody a separate place in space-time above and below the water level?
Well, once the light ray makes it out of the water droplet, it refracts a third time, due again to the change in density of water-to-air. This third refraction sends out the color spectrum of visible light, and since the different wavelengths of visible light refract differently, what is viewed by color-seeing eyes is something like this:
This is above our street, Halsey, in Bed-Stuy. They say that the most vibrant rainbows come when the sky is still mostly dark with rain-clouds (check) and the section of the sky housing the sun is mostly clear (check), facts that usually give not just one, but, as seen here, a second less brilliant but still visible rainbow.
We hardly got any vibrant rainbows when I was a kid growing up in the Sacramento Valley (as I remember it) mainly because, I think, the conditions were hardly conducive. When it rained, it was raining, and the sun wouldn't come out until a day when it wasn't raining, or long after it had stopped.
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