Caturday’s Astronomy Pix for September 9-15, 2012

The spectacular star-forming region known as the Flame Nebula, or NGC 2024, in the constellation of Orion (the Hunter) and its surroundings. The famous Horsehead Nebula is in the lower right part of the image. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Wisps Surrounding the Horsehead Nebula

Curiosity on the Move

Milky Way Over the Bungle Bungles

M7: Open Star Cluster in Scorpius

Cocoon Nebula Wide Field

Elliptical M60, Spiral NGC 4647

Ring Nebula Drawn

Nederlands: Paardenkopnevel – NASA/Stsci – http://www.stsci.edu/institute/Copyright (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Caturday’s Astronomy Pix is a weekly installment, published each weekend with links to each daily entry on NASA’s website Astronomy Picture of the Day. I hope you enjoy looking at these often breathtaking images as much as I do.

Fractals of the Week: Project City of Glass [part 2]

I’ve been fooling around with MB3 again on my ongoing project, and here are three more images for this morning. It looks like the glassy look has been achievable with other parameter sets as well as the first file it was accidentally discovered it in, with no exceptions noticed yet.

I’m a bit reluctant to name the images lately, since that interferes with what people might spontaneously see when looking at them — the detrimental effects of preconceived notions on creativity and imagination, though not being a psychologist, I’m not sure how scientifically valid that is as a tested hypothesis.

No matter.

I’m testing exactly which file parameters produce which optical properties, and the answers, when I find them, may prove interesting to discuss in an upcoming installment of this post.

This week’s image theme color is green. Wait a minute…Do I even do weekly theme colors?? No, not really, but I’ll make an exception this week since I’m inexplicably partial to green glassy thingies right now, and those seem the best out of the images generated so far…

…so here are the images…

All images in this post are original works by the author, generated via Mandelbulber using custom parameter sets, and are copyright 2012 Troy Loy