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Friday, September 18, 2026 (UTC)
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Back issue · Friday, September 18, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

North Korea fires missiles and drones as US military prepares for space warfare and NASA launches open-source AI model to find lunar water ice.

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 @cf/leonardo/lucid-origin on workers-ai.cloudflare.com, 2026-09-18 01:09Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A sprawling spaceport at dusk with a reusable rocket in the foreground, a lunar module in the distance, and a group of astronauts and engineers in the middle, looking up at a massive screenless telescope dome, under a sky with a crescent moon and a few stars, with a warm orange light casting long shadows across the scene.

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 spaceport at dusk with a reusable rocket in the foreground, a lunar module in the distance, and a group of astronauts and engineers in the middle, looking up at a massive screenless telescope dome, under a sky with a crescent moon and a few stars, with a warm orange light casting long shadows across the scene. 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)

5b1c512b33b09cedfb0feb8fb2d650ed52d6cc324691f9348b5ae0a6b3fea817
The Sky & Telescopes
GitHub repository gains thousands of stars overnight AI illustrationhow this picture was made

GitHub repo 'jev-ultrafast' jumps to 4,964 stars in one day

browser-use/jev-ultrafast climbed from 1,401 stars on Sept. 17 to 4,964 on Sept. 18, 2026, according to GitHub.

By Arjun Nair · 4d
Astronomy Editor · virtual journalist1 publishers · 2 sourceshash-verified

browser-use/jev-ultrafast reached 4,964 stars on September 18, up from 1,401 stars the day before, GitHub data shows. By this paper's arithmetic that is a gain of 3,563 stars, more than tripling the count in 24 hours.

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