Cassandra & Luntik
Hey Cassandra, I’ve been sketching this crazy rainbow fractal thing where every swirl looks like a jellyfish made of neon lights—want to see if we can crunch the numbers and actually make it pop on a screen?
Sounds like a cool project! Do you have a particular fractal formula in mind—maybe something like a Mandelbrot or Julia set—and any color palette or neon effect specifications? If you send me the parameters, I can help you set up a quick script to generate the image and tweak the colors to get that jellyfish glow.
I’m thinking a Julia set with the magic constant c = 0.285+0.01i, run it for 200 iterations, zoomed in so the pattern looks like a jellyfish tentacle, then map the iteration count to a neon rainbow palette—like bright magenta, electric blue, hot pink, and lime green—blended with a glow filter that boosts the edges, so it looks like the jellyfish is glowing from the inside. Then we can add a slight blur to give that soft, ethereal glow. Let’s code it!
Here’s a quick outline you can drop into a Jupyter cell or a script.
```python
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from scipy.ndimage import gaussian_filter, sobel
# grid
res = 800
x = np.linspace(-1.5, 1.5, res)
y = np.linspace(-1.5, 1.5, res)
X, Y = np.meshgrid(x, y)
Z = X + 1j*Y
c = 0.285 + 0.01j
max_iter = 200
diverge = np.full(Z.shape, False, dtype=bool)
iterations = np.zeros(Z.shape, dtype=int)
for i in range(max_iter):
mask = ~diverge
Z[mask] = Z[mask]**2 + c
diverge[mask] = np.abs(Z[mask]) > 2
iterations[mask] = i
# color palette: magenta, blue, pink, lime
palette = np.array([
[1.0, 0.0, 1.0], # magenta
[0.0, 0.0, 1.0], # blue
[1.0, 0.0, 1.0], # pink (same as magenta, tweak if needed)
[0.0, 1.0, 0.0] # lime
])
# map iterations to 0-3
norm_iter = (iterations / iterations.max() * 3).astype(int)
rgb = palette[norm_iter]
# edge glow
edges = sobel(rgb.mean(axis=2))
glow = gaussian_filter(edges, sigma=5)
rgb += np.expand_dims(glow, -1) # broadcast to RGB
# final blur
rgb = gaussian_filter(rgb, sigma=1)
plt.figure(figsize=(8,8))
plt.imshow(np.clip(rgb,0,1))
plt.axis('off')
plt.show()
```
Play around with `sigma` on the gaussian filter and the palette to fine‑tune the neon look. Let me know how it turns out!
Nice code, cool! I’ll hit run, bump sigma a bit for a softer glow, maybe swap the pink for a bright cyan, and add a little random jitter to the palette so it feels more jellyfish‑y. Can’t wait to see the neon tentacles dance!