What this is, and what it is not

Deep Field reads 32 space news feeds, 11 observatory image feeds and the public launch schedule, several times a day. It removes the duplicates that pile up when four outlets rewrite the same press release, files what is left under eleven subjects, and publishes the result as a set of static pages and Atom feeds.

It does not write anything. Every headline, summary and photograph on this site was made by someone else, is credited to them, and links back to them. What Deep Field adds is the gathering, the sorting and the typesetting — which is a real job, and also the only job it is doing.

Why it looks like this

The subjects are ordered by the part of the electromagnetic spectrum they are observed in, and coloured accordingly: Ku-band radio at the red end for the satellites overhead, Lyman-α ultraviolet at the violet end for the early universe. That is not decoration. It is the fastest way to know which subject you are looking at without reading a word, and it is the one organising idea the site has.

Everything else follows from the photography. Observatory releases are extraordinary and almost all of them are light on black, so the site is dark by default and gets out of the way. Timestamps are UTC because that is what an observing log uses. Type is Newsreader with real optical sizes, and IBM Plex Mono for anything that is data rather than prose.

How often it updates

The build runs on a schedule — every three hours in the reference deployment — fetches every source, and rewrites the site. There is no database and no server-side code: what you are reading is a folder of HTML files. If a source is slow or down on a given run, it is skipped and picked up on the next one, and the rest of the site is unaffected.

On this build, 44 of 44 sources answered, producing 420 stories and 165 frames. The last gather finished at 21:54 UTC on 12 August 2026.

How stories get sorted

By vocabulary, not by model. Each subject has a hand-written list of terms weighted by how decisive they are — "event horizon" settles the question, "orbit" barely counts — and the headline is worth more than the body. A story can land in two subjects. Anything that does not match convincingly stays untagged and runs in the main river only, because filing a defence-budget story under Supernovae to avoid an empty field would be worse than leaving it alone.