ANSWER:

The approach is to trace a ray's path through the spherical droplet and find the change in angle

after N reflections occur inside the droplet. This is done using Snell's law and basic geometry.

The total change in angle as a function of b I find to be

Δθ = (N + 1)π - 2.a.cos(b) - 2.(N + 1).a.sin(b/n)

where b is the distance from the ray to the line parallel to the ray that passes through the center

of the sphere. n is the index of refraction, and we choose units where the radius of the droplet is

equal to one.

Then minimize this expression with respect to b by taking the derivative and setting equal to zero

and solving for b to get

bo = ((N + 1)2 - n2)/(N + 1)2 - 1))1/2

This is the value of b at which there is a local max/min so that effectively, there is a greater

range of b values here that result in the same deflection angle as compared to all the

other b values. Then plug b0 back in to the formula for Δθ to find the deflection angle

corresponding to this max/min. This is the deflection of the ray, so to get the angle between the

ray and your eye (α) in degrees we can do

α = abs(π - Δθ) 180/π

We'll find that for N = 1, α = 42°. For N = 2, α = 51°.. For N = 3, α = 138° which means that

you might be looking towards the sun.