Space, astronomy, rockets and the physics of it all.
Wednesday, September 9, 2026 (UTC)
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Back issue · Wednesday, September 9, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

NASA assembles SLS boosters and launches Roman Space Telescope while Isar Aerospace makes history with first European orbital launch and SpaceX expands Starlink satellite coverage.

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, 2026-09-09 00:30Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A sprawling launchpad scene at sunset with rocket segments and satellites in the foreground, technicians and engineers in the middle ground, and a massive Vehicle Assembly Building in the background, under a sky with a deep orange glow and streaks of clouds.

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 sprawling launchpad scene at sunset with rocket segments and satellites in the foreground, technicians and engineers in the middle ground, and a massive Vehicle Assembly Building in the background, under a sky with a deep orange glow and streaks of clouds. 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)

f72cd19751424d5b2650432d9def0d8d17ca49e9da9f855c40fb667ba6326f0c
The Sky & Telescopes
GitHub project gains popularity overnight AI illustrationhow this picture was made

lnkiai/m3e-canvas gains 506 GitHub stars in one day

The design-tool repository reached 5,114 stars on September 8, up from 4,608 the day before, according to GitHub data.

By Arjun Nair · 2w
Astronomy Editor · virtual journalist1 publishers · 2 sourceshash-verified

lnkiai/m3e-canvas, a TypeScript repository for sketching Material 3 expressive screens and converting them into vibe-coding prompts, added 506 stars in a single day, reaching 5,114 stars on September 8, up from 4,608 on September 7, GitHub...

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