Space, astronomy, rockets and the physics of it all.
Saturday, September 26, 2026 (UTC)
Back issues
Back issue · Saturday, September 26, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

NASA delays SpaceX Crew-13 launch and announces SR-1 Freedom to Mars while astronomers confirm Planet Elias 2-24 b.

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, 2026-09-26 01:08Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A futuristic spaceport at dusk with a massive rocket looming in the center, astronauts in orange suits walking towards it, and a giant screenless telescope in the background, with a dark blue sky and stars beginning to twinkle, as people of all ages gather to watch the launch, surrounded by sleek spacecraft models and lunar rovers.

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 futuristic spaceport at dusk with a massive rocket looming in the center, astronauts in orange suits walking towards it, and a giant screenless telescope in the background, with a dark blue sky and stars beginning to twinkle, as people of all ages gather to watch the launch, surrounded by sleek spacecraft models and lunar rovers. 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)

bd893a5382c7e174579a54ddd7626e498f796c98712497844cff917aaf6c581e
The Sky & Telescopes
Astronomers discover unexpected bow shock around white dwarf AI illustrationhow this picture was made

VLT detects bow shock outflow around white dwarf 730 light-years away

Astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope observed an unexpected bow shock outflow around white dwarf RXJ0528+2838, located 730 light-years from Earth.

By Arjun Nair · 1h
Astronomy Editor · virtual journalist2 publishers · 2 sources✓ hash-verified

Astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope observed an unexpected bow shock outflow around white dwarf RXJ0528+2838 located 730 light-years from Earth.

The observation was conducted using the MUSE instrument on the VLT in Chile, after hundreds of hours of exposure time.

The white dwarf's bow shock outflow was unexpected, though the study does not state what mechanism produced it or what it changes about current models.

Read with its sources →