Stellar Triumvirate

This is a Newton fractal of a polynomial in the complex plane near the origin. The polynomial was chosen so as to have two-fold 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.

This fractal was rendered using a custom program that I wrote. The image was color-mapped using some new software that I wrote to let me rapidly design and evaluate color mappings. A bit of post-processing was done in GIMP to soften some of the background edges (using a new technique to isolate backgrounds out of images [huzzah!], but alas, it is too technical to include here).

The idea for the name comes from the trio of objects that - to me - look like stars in the center. Also, my wife (~Ryachanira) was involved in getting me interested in this particular fractal and helped brainstorm the Yellow/Blue color scheme.

Technical note: I typically like to render images in 4x the final resolution to allow for anti-aliasing when the image is down-sampled, but due to (another) mix up I lost the exact equation of the polynomial and I couldn't re-render it at higher resolution. Oh well! The anti-alias filter will have to do this time!