Foam In Storm

[Pauldelbrot]

This image is obtained by zooming deep into elephant valley, locating an elephant, then descending into seahorse valley of the large and lopsided minibrot found where the tail joins the body. Then locating the "classic" 29-armed seahorse of this minibrot, then zooming into one of the relatively large period-times-four minibrots to its sides.

Two layers are used: one with a simple navy through cobalt blue to white gradient stretching the full span of the image's iterations and logarithmically mapped; the other, a gradient with dark pastel red and dark pastel pink bands and black bands that repeats every 100 iterations. The former layer is painted onto the latter with 97% opacity and the navy end of its gradient has added translucency. The effect is for the rapid gradient to tint the low-iteration parts of the image and bring out the fine filigreed tapestry of elephant valley structures in the gaps in the seahorse spiral patterns.

The image's magnification puts it just out of the range of an Intel box's floating-point unit, forcing the use of the bignum library with a fairly low level of precision. The high minimum number of iterations is the bigger contributor to the processing time.

Freely redistributable and usable subject to the Creative Commons Attribution license, version 3.0.

Detailed statistics:
Name: Foam In Storm
Date: January 25, 2009
Fractal: Mandelbrot
Location: Seahorse Valley of a minibrot in deep Elephant Valley
Depth: Moderately deep (20 decimals)
Min Iterations: 38,713
Max Iterations: 1,000,000
Layers: 2
Anti-aliasing: 3x3, threshold 0.10, depth 1
Preparation time: 30 minutes
Calculation time: 13.5 hours (2GHz dual-core Athlon XP)