Thanks for the kinds word and the suggestions which I will try and apply to this image.

How the image evolved in chorological order.  I've seen people create fantastic images with Apophysis, so I thought to give it a try, but I just couldn’t get the effect that you see in the above image.  Than I remembered some great freebies that I got way back when I purchased a 3D Video card, the freebie was a plug-in for Photoshop called FraxFlame part of the KPT Tools set by MetaCreations. :)

Anyways, I played around in FraxFlame to get the desired look.  I than rendered the fractals in a separate transparent layer.

At this point, I wanted some kind of Reflective Sphere or Black Hole effect with the surrounding fractals reflected on the sphere.  So I loaded Bryce 6.1 and very quickly realized there is no Background Image feature, this is something I used to love using with "Simply 3D" by Micrografx anyway, so I created a 2D Picture Object via Michael Angelo, and loaded the fractal image with shadows etc.. turned off.. using Parametric.  I pointed the object at the camera and tried to scale to fit the screen, but ran into some difficulty because the original image is 2048x1536.

I created a sphere and played with reflective settings, but since the Fractal is a 2D Object, it didn’t reflect against the sphere like I wanted, instead You get the edges of the sphere reflecting the 2D Fractal and the rest of the sphere showing the sun and clouds.  Playing around with a clear sky etc.. didn’t help much either.  I tried creating another 2D Object with the fractal applied and placing behind the camera, didn’t give me the desired effect either.

At this point I went back to Photoshop and  created the blue sphere comprised of 4 layers with gradient fills and Gaussian blur effects to get the effect that you see.

I will take all  you're suggestions and work with the image and see what I can come up with.

I needed a break from the March Challenge Image :)