From the Chronicle last night:

The National Weather Service promised the sound and fury of an unraveling tropical storm would buffet the Bay Area Wednesday. But it was mostly quiet, save for a glorious double-rainbow that dropped jaws across San Francisco.

rainbow — Photo by KQED's hardboiled financial/tech reporter Aarti Shahani

The newspaper posted 37 photos of the phenomenon. I made it through 13 before frustration over the lack of an accompanying giant unicorn became too much to bear.

Here's another slideshow from The Huffington Post. And Flickr is illuminated as well. (This one is especially cool.)

But the photo to the right -- that was snapped by KQED's ace financial/tech reporter Aarti Shahani, whose frank question at a news conference once provoked Jerry Brown into an impromptu and frenetic oration on the wisdom of government spending. Last night Shahani sent the image to our organizational email reserved for breaking news. Today she recounts the important story behind the photograph...

I was walking out of my gym, catching my breath...when I lost it again. Up in the sky, I saw the biggest, most luminous rainbow I'd ever seen. It was so bright, it turned the sky under it a strange mix of salmon and orange. It was so bright, it managed to dull the SECOND rainbow arching above it. Every pedestrian on the street smiled knowingly at each other, standing together under the same double rainbow.

Don't worry. We made her go back to her regular beat on the mortgage crisis...

rainbowsrainbows

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Photos: Double Rainbow Over San Francisco