Given max amount of iterations = 1000 give me some ideas on how to color (red, green, blue) it. All I can come up right now are lame 2 color gradients :(
Is it actually possible to come up with something as beautiful as this?
50 iterations is very, very coarse and you won't get much detail.
The easiest way to get the spectrum is to use multiple two-color gradients. So, 50-41 iterations might be shades of blue, 41-30 might be blue-red, and 29-10 might be red-green, and 9-0 might be green-white.
An RGB monitor's gamut is triangular, so such a scheme pretty much follows the outside of the "color wheel."
A search for HSV RGB library might turn up tools to help use the easier HSV color system.