Power in space · Generation, transmission, storage, use · Government and first-party sources
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Image of the Day · 2026-08-09

Portable Midnight

Portable midnight: shade as a manufactured object; the probe carries the only night for millions of kilometers, and stars appear only inside its shadow

An artistic imagining, not existing hardware: flat poster-style illustration of a black machined sunshade disc eclipsing the Sun, ringed by a blazing cream rim, a corona of fine gold ticks, and broad concentric bands of orange and red radiance. A stepped blue wedge of shadow fans to the lower right, where a small hexagonal probe with a glowing cyan instrument eye hangs behind the shade on a thin strut, faint stars visible only inside the shadow it carries.
An artistic imagining, not existing hardware: close to the Sun, a small probe rides a few meters behind its circular sunshade, inside the only shadow for millions of kilometers. The shade's rim burns, the corona of fury goes silent in its wake, and the wedge of night it casts stays cold enough for instruments to think, and dark enough to show stars. Near the Sun, shade is the most engineered thing in the sky. The day-7 thermal slot of the poweringspace.com Image of the Day series (backfill 2026-08-09). Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
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