Fractal visionaries:

Today's fractal has a squeezed, uneasy feeling about it.  It is not beautiful.  It is a picture of a rather ordinary midget buried deep in the northeast corner of the Mandelbrot set.  What makes this midget unusual is that I caught it as it was being squeezed by an ever decreasing bailout radius, and ready to be swallowed up.

When a midget is very close to the escape radius, (something that can happen only when the escape radius is set to less than two), the character of its surroundings totally changes.  Instead of lacy chaos, such squeezed midgets are surrounded by blobs of color pushing in toward them.  The iteration count of these blobs is not in order, but jumps around in a random manner, which makes coloring these fractals difficult.

This same effect is what makes the tiny midgets far out on the negative x-axis so attractive when the bailout is set to 4 and they are therefore near the escape radius, and so plain when the bailout is set to 100 or so.

The exact bailout setting where a particular midget distorts like this is rather critical.  It must be found by trial and error, bracketing and closing in on the exact point where the screen goes blank.  It cannot be done with the hard-coded Mandelbrot formula because Fractint permits only integer values to be entered for the bailout.

The picture takes 25 minutes to draw on a 486-100mhz machine at 640x480 resolution, and is posted to a.b.p.f. and a.f.p.

Jim Muth
jamth@mindspring.com


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