Eternal dance of the cosmos

It goes on...

Stellar birth pangs

New stars beginning to coalesce in their gravitational crucibles within a galactic foundry.

Stars behind stars behind stars

"Far away in that ocean of gold, stars were silently shooting and falling and finding their fates, among those billions and billions of merging golden lights. And curtain after curtain of gauze was quietly removed, and I saw stars behind stars behind stars, as in the magical Odeons of my youth. And I saw into the vast soft interior of the universe which was slowly and gently turning itself inside out. I went to sleep, and in my sleep I seemed to hear a sound of singing."

- from 'The Sea, The Sea' by iris Murdoch

One of my oft-quoted passages, I finally create an image of it! Rendered with flam3-2.8-beta3.

Frozen cosmos

A conceptual vision of universal 'heat-death' - not, as I originally took it to mean, death by heat, rather the death of heat. Whole galaxies sit suspended for eternity in icy skeins, testament to an age that only was. Even entropy is spent.

The curious rime effect is obtained by use of a small filter radius (0.1) coupled with large master scale (100) and suitable gradient.