Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Geographic Portland, Oregon Flag





The Geographic Portland, Oregon flag has field of red and orange.  These colors relate to lines of longitude.  In these types of objective and truly scientific flags, colors are coded to numbers.  The order of color to number is based upon the official order of the rainbow. 

Red is coded 1, since it is the first color of the rainbow.  Orange is coded to 2, as it is the second color. Usually Geographic flags of this nature are tribars.  However Portland, Oregon lies on the 122th Western Meridian, thus it gets double dose of orange -forming a block. 

In the center the two five pointed stars reveal Portland's Longitude, which is 45 Degrees North.  Remember that green is coded to 4, since it the fourth color of the rainbow.  And that blue is coded to 5, since it is the fifth color of the rainbow.  Thus when read the stars show us 45 Degrees North.  As the dominant green star is pointing upwards, this indicates a Northern Parallel. 

Note that the white pentagon in the center relates to hemisphere.  Since it is white, we know it is a Western Meridian.  Otherwise a yellow pentagon indicates an Eastern Meridian.  Finally this is a vexillologically "GOOD FLAG" and coincidentally happens to conserve the main colors of the official Portland, Oregon City Flag - green and blue.


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Image Credit: Wikipedia
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1a/PDX%2C_Oregon_collage.png

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