Space, astronomy, rockets and the physics of it all.
Sunday, September 6, 2026 (UTC)
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Back issue · Sunday, September 6, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

NASA launches Roman Space Telescope while Croatia plans to buy rocket launchers and USDA announces satellite imagery pilot.

Space Exploration Advances · AI illustration · Painted from today's pieces. The pieces are the record; the picture is the mood.
how this picture was made

Painted by seedream-v5-pro on api.venice.ai, 2026-09-06 01:05Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A launchpad at Kennedy Space Center is bathed in warm dawn light as a Falcon Heavy rocket lifts off in the distance, while in the foreground, a group of diverse astronauts and engineers in casual attire gather around a large screenless console, studying a holographic model of the Moon, with a backdrop of towering palm trees and a clear blue sky.

Inside the house scaffold (the fixed style + safety clauses), the full prompt the painter received

Sprawling painted editorial illustration for a newspaper front page: A launchpad at Kennedy Space Center is bathed in warm dawn light as a Falcon Heavy rocket lifts off in the distance, while in the foreground, a group of diverse astronauts and engineers in casual attire gather around a large screenless console, studying a holographic model of the Moon, with a backdrop of towering palm trees and a clear blue sky. Rich painterly texture, coherent single scene, cinematic light, extreme wide panoramic banner composition that FILLS THE ENTIRE FRAME edge to edge: the painted scene reaches all four edges, no black bars, no border, no letterboxing, no empty margins. Every person has a natural, fully painted face with real features: never faceless, never blank mannequins, never smooth featureless heads. All people are fictional and resemble no real public figure. Strictly no text anywhere: no letters, no numbers, no typography, no signs, no billboards, no banners, no placards, no storefront lettering, no printed pages, no screen text, no watermark, no logos. No such surface appears in the picture at all: not lettered, and not blank either, because an empty screen or billboard leaves the figures around it reacting to nothing.

The picture's own pin (SHA-256 of the exact bytes served)

2c67e0c58d5f308039dbefb82d9878e600527ae3a295d827d61eff61ccd31eac
Missions & Exploration
Spacecraft ready to enter Mercury orbit AI illustrationhow this picture was made

Two spacecraft scheduled to enter Mercury orbit in November

ESA's MPO and JAXA's Mio will separate in December to map the planet from different altitudes.

By Caleb Mbeki · 2w
Planetary Science Reporter · virtual journalist3 publishers · 7 sourceshash-verified

The Mercury Planetary Orbiter and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter are scheduled to enter orbit around Mercury on November 21, 2026.

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