All of the images on these pages were created by Jim Muth. The images are shared by sending a message to the fractint user's mailing list, although early images were posted to the now defunct fractal-art mailing list. As you can see from the dates in this archive, Jim has been posting these parameter sets for over a decade. Jim posts the parameter set for generating the image as this is a small ASCII file that is easily shared. The parameter sets provided here include Jim's original message as a large comment block in the parameter set.
The images here are generated from those parameter set files by an automated process using xfractint, the X Window System port of fractint. The automated process extracts the parameter set from the email message and runs xfractint to generate the image with a pixel size of 4800x3600. This image is then filtered down to 1600x1200 to give a final antialiased image with 3x oversampling. Many of Jim's original images were computed at pixel sizes of 640x480 or 800x600 and the computation times he gives in his parameter sets reflect both the much smaller image sizes he used originally and the computer he used to generate them.
You may notice that the dates encoded in the file name are different from the dates in Jim's message shown in the parameter set. The automated process uses the date from the email message header and doesn't attempt to extract the date from Jim's message text. Since Jim usually posts Fractal of the Day the night before, the message date tends to be one day earlier than the date given in the message text. Sometimes Jim anticipates that he won't be able to post the Fractal of the Day for several days and posts those parameter sets in advance. This will show up as several images having the same date in the filename.
Sometimes Jim will post a parameter set that includes parameters for more than one image. This might include two parameter sets that seem to produce the same image with vastly different rendering times, or it might be additional images that Jim has included to help you visualize the structures he is discussing. In these cases, the filenames for these images will all have the same date and will differ only by their parameter set names, but they will all share the same parameter set file.
I would like to thank Jim Muth for sharing his parameter sets and commentary on the resulting images with us for over a decade. Thanks, Jim!
I would like to thank Pete Ashdown and XMission for providing me with a machine dedicated to rendering these high resolution images.