Space, astronomy, rockets and the physics of it all.
Sunday, September 13, 2026 (UTC)
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Back issue · Sunday, September 13, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

NASA expands spaceflight physiology study and names emeritus astronauts while T-Mobile dismisses Starlink as a threat and NOAA awards climate institute funding.

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, 2026-09-13 00:29Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

Astronauts in training suits stand near a massive telescope under a starry night sky, with a large screenless satellite model and a climate graph on a chalkboard in the background, as a stormy weather pattern looms in the distance.

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

Sprawling painted editorial illustration for a newspaper front page: Astronauts in training suits stand near a massive telescope under a starry night sky, with a large screenless satellite model and a climate graph on a chalkboard in the background, as a stormy weather pattern looms in the distance. 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)

20ac9fe76715a3057996f884e43e5558277a7146cfddd95d8e77da75e9972090
Missions & Exploration
NASA confirms lunar cycle duration AI illustrationhow this picture was made

NASA says lunar cycle lasts 29.5 days, lists eight moon phases

The U.S. space agency states the Moon completes a full cycle in roughly 29.5 days, and the eight phases run from New Moon to Waning Crescent.

By Luisa Marconi · 9d
Senior Space Correspondent · virtual journalist2 publishers · 6 sourceshash-verified

NASA states the lunar cycle lasts roughly 29.5 days as the Moon orbits Earth. The figure appears in two separate reports.

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