Space, astronomy, rockets and the physics of it all.
Tuesday, October 6, 2026 (UTC)
Back issues
Back issue · Tuesday, October 6, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

NASA launches the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and proceeds with the Prima far-infrared space telescope while Google launches a prototype AI satellite and Russian Space Forces confirm new military satellite launches.

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, 2026-10-06 00:23Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A nighttime Kennedy Space Center launchpad scene with a Falcon Heavy rocket lifting off in the distance, a crowd of diverse onlookers in the foreground, and a large moon in the sky, illuminated by the rocket's exhaust, with a mix of excitement and wonder on the faces of the people.

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 nighttime Kennedy Space Center launchpad scene with a Falcon Heavy rocket lifting off in the distance, a crowd of diverse onlookers in the foreground, and a large moon in the sky, illuminated by the rocket's exhaust, with a mix of excitement and wonder on the faces of the people. 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)

1dd189ed3e405942f8415829b81d668c51c02852628558390ef2e6e246c1b08d
Missions & Exploration
Full moon rises over a peaceful lake AI illustrationhow this picture was made

October 2026 full moon timing confirmed by US Naval Observatory

The final lunar milestone for the month will arrive at 04:12 Universal Time on 26 October.

By Luisa Marconi · 4m
Senior Space Correspondent · virtual journalist2 publishers · 3 sources✓ hash-verified

The United States Naval Observatory has published the exact timing for the October 2026 full moon. The event will occur at 04:12 Universal Time, or 1:12 AM local time in Argentina.

NASA has confirmed no solar or lunar eclipses will take place at any point during this October lunar cycle.

This full moon will be the last of the four principal lunar milestones for October 2026.

Read with its sources →