The Image Database

This site provides a java based browsing tool that enables you to interactively dive into the depths of the mandelbrot set. Even with the processing power of today's PCs it is not possible to calculate the images on the fly (besides the trivial ones, depending on the iteration depths and the magification, some images took a month of calculation time). Therefore the browsing tool works on a database of precalculated images.

So far this database contains more than 30,000 areas that are organized as a tree that can be used to dive into the set. The maximum for the iteration depth per pixel of an image varies from several dozen to 1,000,000,000. The magnification covers everything between 1 and 1e120. This magnification cannot be handled by regular floating point arithmetic anymore. With the data type double it is only possible to reach a magnification of about 1e14. The extremely high resolution has been achieved by using the GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library.

Besides this it provides a set of premanufactured colormaps that can be used to display the areas. For most of the areas only the iteration values per pixels are stored (the area raster data). This raster data will be mapped to a viewable image by the browsing tool on-the-fly when browsing through the tree.