Light of the Seraphim

"I am the Metatron. Don't tell me the name doesn't ring a bell. ... I am a seraphim. The highest choir of angels. You do know what an angel is, don't you?" -Metatron, Dogma

This highly detailed Newton fractal serves as a counterpart to Atom of Authority. It depicts a member of the mythical Seraphim, the highest order of the angels. They are beings that radiate truth and power with such intensity that they are literally on fire and can not be looked upon even by other divine beings.

I'm not sure what to think of my decision to interpret this piece using religious iconography. Perhaps Worf says it best: "These are our stories; they tell us who we are!"

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. The sparkle at the center was also added via GIMP to transform that otherwise mathematically uninteresting region into something more visually stimulating. 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).