This was my first painting to make the cover after the radical redesign of the magazine in 2001. It depicts the final moments of a sunlike star as a white dwarf approaches it. I had originally conceived the star as "bursting at the seams" as its outer layers were stretched by tidal forces and there was less weight to contain the pressure of its fusion fires, but this might not happen, as the system will always be in gravitational equilibrium. The stars were created as 3D models in Cinema 4D and then married into the foreground image, created in Photoshop.