I often like to return to the Mandelbrot set for inspiration and the new year seemed like a good time. Lately, I've been playing with high-iteration, but not-deep-zoom fractals--those which require a lot of iterations but at a reasonable magnification (deep zoom on Ultra Fractal kicks in around a magnification of 1E16). This gives me the chance to look at/for new structures and to do so without waiting days for the image to appear.
This is one of my explorations. It's based on the fraction 2/9, chosen to celebrate the year 2009. I like that there's very little "background" (black) in the image; it's almost completely filled in with structure. This can give you a sense of how the boundary of the Mandelbrot set has a fractal dimension of 2: as you zoom in, the structure of the boundary becomes so dense that it fills in an area. The zoom here is a paltry 24 million, but you can already sense the space filling in.
One other feature: the inside color is Mimosa, Pantone's Color of the Year for 2009 (242/181/11 in RGB space, as near as I can tell).
This is one of my explorations. It's based on the fraction 2/9, chosen to celebrate the year 2009. I like that there's very little "background" (black) in the image; it's almost completely filled in with structure. This can give you a sense of how the boundary of the Mandelbrot set has a fractal dimension of 2: as you zoom in, the structure of the boundary becomes so dense that it fills in an area. The zoom here is a paltry 24 million, but you can already sense the space filling in.
One other feature: the inside color is Mimosa, Pantone's Color of the Year for 2009 (242/181/11 in RGB space, as near as I can tell).