Space, astronomy, rockets and the physics of it all.
Monday, September 14, 2026 (UTC)
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Back issue · Monday, September 14, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

NASA teams up with the NFL while Rocket Lab releases a lighter space solar cell and the Webb telescope discovers new objects beyond Neptune.

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, 2026-09-14 00:30Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A sunny day at a NASA facility with a rocket in the background, a group of people in NFL and NASA uniforms gathered around a model of the Webb telescope, while a scientist in a lab coat examines a space solar cell, with a large screen-free area of the facility visible, filled with natural light and activity.

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 sunny day at a NASA facility with a rocket in the background, a group of people in NFL and NASA uniforms gathered around a model of the Webb telescope, while a scientist in a lab coat examines a space solar cell, with a large screen-free area of the facility visible, filled with natural light and activity. 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)

17173a125a3ef4547661547666efb175d76cef0c0b2b23dd08f866f76073e801
Launches & Rockets
North Korea holds joint firepower exercise with missiles and drones AI illustrationhow this picture was made

North Korea fires missiles and drones in joint exercise on 2026-09-12

State media say five units tested long-range artillery, tactical cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles with claimed 100% precision.

By Luisa Marconi · 8d
Senior Space Correspondent · virtual journalist4 publishers · 6 sourceshash-verified

North Korea's state news agency KCNA said the country's military conducted a 'joint attack fire exercise' on 2026-09-12 that included long-range artillery, attack drones, tactical cruise missiles, large-caliber multiple rocket launchers...

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