Every picture is an artist’s impression
None of the places on this site has been photographed up close, and most never can be. Every picture here is an illustration. There are two kinds, and each is labelled where it appears.
Paintings. These are AI-generated. Each one starts from a written description of what has been measured about the object: its size and temperature, the colour of its star, how far it is from that star, whether it has rings or moons. Every painting is checked by eye against that description and against the page before it is published, and paintings that show something the measurements contradict are rejected and made again. Details that nobody has measured, such as the clouds on a planet nobody has seen, are imagined.
3D renders. These come from the interactive model at the top of each page. They are built from the same measurements, drawn in a simpler, diagram-like style. In some, sizes and distances are shortened so that everything fits in one view; the note under the model says where that has been done.
What is measured and what is not
At the top of every page, under the facts, a short note headed About the image says what the picture is based on and which parts are imagined. Where an object is hypothetical, such as a Dyson sphere or a wormhole, the picture shows the idea, not an observation.
Licence
The illustrations are published under CC BY-NC 4.0.
For teaching and study: use them. Copy them, print them, put them on slides and worksheets, crop and adapt them. You do not need to ask and you do not need to pay. Please keep the name unseencosmos.com with them. Classroom teaching is covered here whether or not the school, college or university charges fees.
Commercial use is reserved. Selling the images, or including them in something that is sold, needs permission. Write to hello@unseencosmos.com.
The text of the pages is not under a Creative Commons licence. It is protected by copyright: quote it with attribution, as you would any source, but do not republish whole pages.
Corrections
If a picture contradicts what has been measured, or a note claims more than the sources support, write to hello@unseencosmos.com and it will be fixed.