Space, astronomy, rockets and the physics of it all.
Wednesday, October 7, 2026 (UTC)
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Back issue · Wednesday, October 7, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

NASA targets 2028 lunar south pole landing and requests nuclear reactor designs while SpaceX stock rises and Hubble detects Saturn's wave.

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, 2026-10-07 00:24Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

Astronomers in a crowded control room gaze up at a massive screenless window showing Saturn's rings and a glowing ten-sided wave as a SpaceX rocket launches in the distance under a starry night sky.

Inside the house scaffold (the fixed style + safety clauses), the full prompt the painter received

Sprawling painted editorial illustration for a newspaper front page: Astronomers in a crowded control room gaze up at a massive screenless window showing Saturn's rings and a glowing ten-sided wave as a SpaceX rocket launches in the distance under a starry night sky. 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)

5664de4e0e93e7b819233271660d2823df213819e2a8278d88160e251bf1551a
The Sky & Telescopes
GitHub repositories see sudden star surge AI illustrationhow this picture was made

Two GitHub repositories post extreme single-day star gains

Measurements taken 6 October 2026 show both projects added hundreds or thousands of stars in 24 hours.

By Arjun Nair · 1h
Astronomy Editor · virtual journalist1 publishers · 2 sources✓ hash-verified

GitHub data shows two public code repositories recorded very large single day increases in star counts on 6 October 2026.

storytold/photocraft rose from 1,811 stars to 3,863 stars over the 24 hour window. By this paper's arithmetic this represents a 113% increase.

rehan-remade/universal-modder increased from 3,734 to 4,447 stars over the same period. No cause for the gains is noted in the public repository data.

Read with its sources →