Back issue · Sunday, September 20, 2026 · as it ran
NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission reveals asteroid Bennu's weak surface and NASA awards SpaceX $946M for space station crew flights as GitHub repositories gain popularity.
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-originon workers-ai.cloudflare.com, 2026-09-20 00:34Z. Scene directed by@cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.
The scene the art director wrote
A vast dark asteroid field stretches across the horizon under a starry night sky with a massive asteroid in the foreground, its surface cracked and weak, while in the distance a rocket soars upwards, leaving a trail of light, and a group of diverse astronauts in suits gather around a lunar rover, examining the terrain with a sense of wonder and curiosity.
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 vast dark asteroid field stretches across the horizon under a starry night sky with a massive asteroid in the foreground, its surface cracked and weak, while in the distance a rocket soars upwards, leaving a trail of light, and a group of diverse astronauts in suits gather around a lunar rover, examining the terrain with a sense of wonder and curiosity. 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)
By Theo Anand · 2d
