© Lewis Maudlin
The phenomenon occurred over the city on Saturday evening and luckily someone got a picture.
Lewis Maudlin, 24, from Wallsend, was playing pool at his girlfriend's house in Walker when he clocked the uncommon sight.
He said: "It was lovely night, still dead sunny and clear after 7pm.
"I heard a plane going over so looked up at the sky and then saw this weird upside-down rainbow.
"We didn't know what to make of it, none of us had seen anything like that before - it looked like a smile in the sky.
"I've got no idea if it's good luck or bad luck but you can definitely tell there's no pot of gold at the end of it."
The technical term for an upside-down rainbow is a circumzenithal arc, an optical phenomenon which occurs much higher in the sky than normal rainbows.
Common rainbows are caused by light shining through raindrops but circumzenithal arcs appear when light is refracted through ice crystals higher up in the atmosphere.
Although they occur quite regularly, they can rarely be seen from the ground because they are so high up and it requires cloudless, still conditions for them to be visible.
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