Power in space · Generation, transmission, storage, use · Government and first-party sources
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Image of the Day · 2026-06-09

Jupiter, Cut to Fit

Jupiter cut out of the page and re-pasted as a dynamo, every seam left showing.

An artistic imagining, not real hardware, and not a plan. A Dada-style photomontage on a near-black plum field, built entirely from scissored fragments, each one printed as a halftone dot screen at its own ruling and its own angle. Across the lower right runs a huge crescent of a banded gas giant, cut along its own limb and bleeding off two edges of the frame, its cloud bands drawn as rows of magenta dots and its edge burning bright. A spiral storm has been cut out and pasted onto it. Clamped along the crescent's edge are heavy chamfered blocks, striped coils and perforated strips, each pasted at a different scale. The same planet reappears at the left as a much smaller crescent, and round discs stand in for moons at five wildly different sizes, from a fifth of the frame down to a speck. A torn slab of cloud banding fills the upper left, a cream-dotted slab the upper right, and one fragment is blown up so far that its printing screen has become the picture. Hundreds of tiny cut chips of magenta and cream scatter through the middle like trapped particles. Pale translucent tape strips cross several joins. Every fragment carries a bright cut edge and a soft shadow, so no seam is hidden. No text, lettering, insignia, or figures appear anywhere.
A fully speculative artistic imagining — no real program, hardware, or proposal: nothing depicted here exists or is planned. It pushes power in space to its furthest extreme, imagining Jupiter itself re-engineered as a dynamo — the spinning planet and its magnetosphere as the armature, the radiation belt as the working fluid, moons as commutator segments, and brush blocks clamped on the planet's own edge to take the current off — and it is built as a Hoech photomontage, so the giant is literally cut into pieces from seven different printed pages and pasted back together with every seam, screen clash and scale collision left showing. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
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