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Fractal Movie: Spiral Galaxy
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About the Fractal Movie (Artistic):
Some of the stars you see in the night sky are not single stars, but rather are galaxies – collections of billions of stars. These galaxies are so distant that they appear to be but a single point of light to the naked eye. Our own star, the Sun, is part of a galaxy – the Milky Way galaxy. Nobody has seen the Milky Way galaxy from afar, but if we could it is believed that it would look very much like our nearest galactic neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy. The Andromeda galaxy is a spiral galaxy - the most common shape of galaxies. Spiral galaxies are flat like a pancake, with the individual stars rotating about a common center. For unknown reasons, the stars in spiral galaxies often cluster together, forming long, sweeping arms and looking much like a giant pinwheel. I thought this movie looked remarkably like a spiral galaxy. Perhaps spiral galaxies, too, are examples of fractals in nature.
About the Fractal Movie (Technical):
The Spiral Galaxy movie was created using the "melting" visual effect (as was the movie by that name). In this technique, the fractals' image magnifications and image centers are constant throughout the movie; only the fractals' iteration thresholds vary, giving the illusion of motion. The fractals' interior regions (white areas) are monochromatic. When a monochromatic interior is used, the iteration threshold determines how much of the fractals' underlying details are revealed. The movie begins with an iteration threshold of 170; at this value, the fractal's interior region is swelled, hiding much of the detail. As the movie progresses, the iteration threshold slowly increases to a final value of 260. As it does, the interior region shrinks, spiraling inward and revealing the detailed, hard-core structure within.
"Spiral Galaxy" is a close-up of one of the structures contained in the final frame of the movie "Pinwheels", and part of the same spiral arms that are featured in the movie "Melting". As such, the movie is a portion of the Mandelbrot fractal – seen at a magnification of 6,400,000. At this magnification, the original size of the screen image (magnification = 1) was about the size of a virus.
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