About Starfish
Near c ≈ −0.374 + 0.660i, on a period-5 bulb attached to the main cardioid, the Mandelbrot set produces a parade of five-armed radial decorations that look like starfish suspended in deep water. The five-fold symmetry is mathematical: every period-n bulb generates n-armed antennas and n-fold symmetric decorations as you zoom in. Mandelbro opens this view with the rainbow palette to play up the radial structure — each arm cycles through a clean spectrum that makes the symmetry obvious. Zoom in further and the arms split into smaller five-pointed copies, all the way down to the next minibrot.
About the Mandelbrot set
The Mandelbrot set is the set of complex numbersc for which the iteration zn+1 = zn2 + c does not escape to infinity. Its boundary is a fractal of infinite detail: every region you zoom into reveals new spirals, dendrites, and miniature copies of the entire set. Starfish is one of the most recognizable patterns in this boundary.
How Mandelbro renders this view
At this zoom level, Mandelbro uses standard double-precision rendering with a parallel pool of Web Workers — every CPU core in your device runs the escape-time algorithm in parallel on a slice of the viewport. Push the zoom another twelve orders of magnitude in and the renderer automatically switches to its perturbation pipeline, which uses one high-precision reference orbit to keep deep zooms sharp. See how Mandelbro works for the full explanation.