© Burton Mail
The sight was so rare that few people in the UK have ever encountered one before.
What they saw was an anomaly of nature: the incredible spectacle of an upside down rainbow.
Wayne Burgess, who lives in Tutbury, spotted the remarkable sight when he was outside with his two young children during a regular, sunny afternoon on Monday.
What he did not expect to see while he was with his children was a meteorological event that rarely occurs away from the North and South Poles.
"I was playing in the garden with my children, Natalie and Zak, when my daughter said 'look at that rainbow'," he said.
"When we all looked up, to our amazement, we saw that it was upside down." The curved rays of light left Mr Burgess so dumbfounded that he photographed them using his mobile phone.
The phenomenon, which rarely occurs in non-Arctic conditions, is caused by sunlight bending when it hits crystals of ice floating five miles above the Earth.
The upside down rainbow is in fact so rare that Paul Gilliver, who has run Newhall Weather Station for the Met Office for the last 10 years, was unaware of the sighting.
The meteorologist said: "Upside down rainbows are very rare indeed".
"They are not something I have ever heard of or seen before, but to see one would be quite a spectacle".
"I presume the cause is the sunlight refracting as it passes through either water or ice in the sky." There have, however, been some sightings of upside down rainbows before in the UK.
One was spotted by an astronomer as it appeared over Cambridge in September 2008.
Another was photographed in August 2009 over Sussex.
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