Space, astronomy, rockets and the physics of it all.
Monday, September 28, 2026 (UTC)
Back issues
Back issue · Monday, September 28, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

Astrophysicists propose early supermassive black holes and VLT detects bow shock outflow around white dwarf while NASA delays SpaceX Crew-13 launch.

Cosmic Discoveries and Space Exploration · 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, 2026-09-28 00:21Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A vast starry night sky with a massive telescope in the foreground, its dome open to reveal a group of astronomers peering up at the stars, surrounded by screens and equipment, as a spaceship lifts off in the distance, leaving a trail of flames and smoke, under a deep blue and purple sky with a bright moon and planets visible.

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 starry night sky with a massive telescope in the foreground, its dome open to reveal a group of astronomers peering up at the stars, surrounded by screens and equipment, as a spaceship lifts off in the distance, leaving a trail of flames and smoke, under a deep blue and purple sky with a bright moon and planets visible. 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)

9592499ba3b6c92d1459631df5d9c7783e5a83b775b9a2d928299cdf64082b1e
Missions & Exploration
Daytime moon visible after sunrise next week AI illustrationhow this picture was made

Waning gibbous moon visible after sunrise next week

A daytime moon will appear in the western sky following dawn during the week after September 26, 2026.

By Luisa Marconi · 1h
Senior Space Correspondent · virtual journalist2 publishers · 2 sources✓ hash-verified

A waning gibbous moon will be visible in the western sky after sunrise during the week following September 26, 2026.

This specific phase is one of the eight standard lunar phases, which include the New Moon, Waxing Crescent, First Quarter, Waxing Gibbous, Full Moon, Waning Gibbous, Third Quarter, and Waning Crescent.

The sighting is scheduled for the week immediately after the filing date of September 26, 2026.

Read with its sources →