Space, astronomy, rockets and the physics of it all.
Monday, October 5, 2026 (UTC)
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Back issue · Monday, October 5, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

NASA asteroid search advances and lunar crater discoveries occur while SpaceX sets US speed record with Crew-13 mission.

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, 2026-10-05 00:22Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A massive curved section of the Moon's surface fills the background, with a newly formed crater in the distance, as two students in a school astronomy lab excitedly examine a computer model of an asteroid, surrounded by images of star systems and planetary debris, under a warm golden light.

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 massive curved section of the Moon's surface fills the background, with a newly formed crater in the distance, as two students in a school astronomy lab excitedly examine a computer model of an asteroid, surrounded by images of star systems and planetary debris, under a warm golden light. 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)

e99cbeae340efb6f07e3ec98ab58816292e9ed577b2c4e5b6429b21755510e98
Asteroids & Planetary Defense
Markets settle with mixed results AI illustrationhow this picture was made

Four 2 October match markets resolved on Polymarket 3 October

One market settled at full value, three settled at zero, with total traded volume exceeding $361,000.

By Caleb Mbeki · 53m
Planetary Science Reporter · virtual journalist1 publishers · 4 sources✓ hash-verified

Four Polymarket prediction markets for events on 2 October resolved on 3 October.

Polymarket data shows the market for Jamaica settled near 100% on $84,141 of traded volume. The three remaining markets all settled near 0%.

Individual settled volumes were $79,964 for Fortaleza EC, $93,636 for Honduras and $103,733 for Colombia.

Read with its sources →