Photo of a Glass Bead Rainbow

UPDATE: USRA's EPOD (Earth Science Picture of the Day) has featured this photo! They also say:

I walked to work last week while we had unusually cool weather here in Central Pennsylvania. On Friday, I was treated to an optical phenomena that I had read about but never witnessed: The Glass Bead Bow.

Like a rainbow, the effect is created by circular transparent globes, but in this case, not raindrops but rather glass beads, which apparently are applied to road lines after painting, presumably to keep the paint from being thrown up onto cars by their tires (it also makes the area very slick!). UPDATE: The glass beads are for reflective purposes, duh, as some smartass Reddit readers told me.

As cars pick up some of the beads they spread them around the general area where the stripe was painted, creating large enough of an area to generate the rainbow. It's actually not unlike creating your own rainbow with your garden hose - you just need enough tiny globes of something to generate a 360-degree rainbow. Les Cowley of Atmospheric Optics has more information on Glass Bead bows - even though it's not technically "atmospheric", he likes to explain all related effects (he points out that this is the same effect you can see as rainbows in street signs as well, which I have also noticed).

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