Abstract
An experiment by Marston and Trinh1, showed how an oblate spheroidal water drop illuminated by a parallel beam of light forms a caustic in the far field characterized by the hyperbolic umbilic catastrophe—a generalization of the primary rainbow formed by a spherical drop. As the axis-ratio of the drop was changed, they observed a singular section of the catastrophe appearing for D/H = 1.305 ± 0.016—D being the diameter in the horizontal equatorial plane and H the diameter along the vertical axis of rotational symmetry. I show here how this ratio may be calculated to confirm quantitatively the arguments1 that the hyperbolic–umbilic catastrophe is associated with skew rays, and predict the occurrence of novel ‘lips’ phenomena, yet to be observed.
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