Atom of Authority

"ATOM, n. An indivisible or fundamental unit"

This highly detailed Newton Fractal conveys a sense of the radiant authority emanating from the center and being carried into the periphery. I imagine that if "authority" could be visualized as a fundamental unit that it would feature a strong central core (a "general" of sorts) surrounded by several lieutenants who would in turn delegate commands to their subordinates (and so on) toward the periphery. The "atom" is bounded by a circular border describing the limits of command. The central core also has some detailed thin lines running through it which made me think of electrons buzzing around a nucleus from classical models of a chemical atom.

This is the first complicated fractal that I have rendered by explicitly specifying the roots of the polynomial and shaping the fractal into a form I desired (rather than my typical strategy of randomly generating lots of fractals subject to symmetry conditions and then selecting the most interesting to continue work on). I'm very excited to be finally taking that step as a fractal artist! Hooray!

Some Technical Details
This is a Newton fractal of a polynomial in the complex plane near the origin. The zeros of the polynomial were chosen so as to have symmetry. At each point Newton's method is used to find a zero of the polynomial and the number of iterations required to converge to a zero determines the intensity at each pixel. The image was color-mapped and post-processed in GIMP to add vibrancy and to soften some edges that I thought were not very artistically pleasing in the background. This method is very similar to the method I used to create Inner Light and Moment of Creation.

This fractal was rendered using a custom program that I wrote.

For once I managed to remember to render this in 4x (3600x3600) and NOT lose the polynomial equation somewhere along the way. The display image should be 900x900 (4x downsampling for anti-aliasing purposes), but if you'd like to see the 3600x3600 image, please download.