A. GOAL vs RESULT - Intended: A single frame that compresses 300 million years of a galactic merger using multi‑exposure/ghost‑trail rendering of twin galaxy cores along their inward spiral. The image should make time feel folded (vertigo of time), frame the merger as violent beauty, and carry inevitability through a charged seam, Roche‑lobe “peanut” morphology, braided tidal necks, lensing caustics, and an ember‑amethyst JWST‑IR palette. - Produced: Two images were generated but no visual descriptions were captured. A “prompt match: 5/10” suggests some morphological anchors may have been partially realized, but colors, composition, and mood are unknown. Without a caption, the core experiment—stroboscopic ghost‑trail time encoding—cannot be confirmed, and the target emotions cannot be validated. B. GAP IDENTIFICATION - Primary gap: prompt→image→caption. The images may exist, but the Stage‑A caption/capture failed, preventing evaluation of whether time compression read as “ghosted inevitability” or as visual clutter. - Secondary gap: concept→prompt translation drift. The prompts are enumerative bullets heavy with material metaphors (“molten optical glass,” “gold‑leaf flecks”), which historically tilt outputs toward jewelry/ornamental readings and away from austere cosmic composition. Temporal compression is implied (“ghost trail”) but not structurally enforced via verb-led composition (near‑kiss seam, stroboscopic echoes, interference fringe). - Missing visual operators: razor-thin “near‑kiss” seam, explicit stroboscopic echoes of the cores, negative space as temporal void, and faint lensing caustics—all absent or unverified. C. ROOT CAUSE - Prompt design: Over-specified object lists and material metaphors crowd the scene and invite the model into familiar “astro‑illustration with jewelry artifacts,” undermining the ontology of incomprehensibility and the time-encoding hypothesis. - Lack of compositional verbs: Without “near‑kiss,” “shear,” “echo,” “strobe,” the model has no strong scaffold for encoding time as a readable visual structure. - Pipeline reliability: Caption capture is not enforced as a gating step; the investigation cannot be assessed when the description is missing. D. CORRECTIONS - Prompt reform: Collapse to one clean, verb-led sentence per image (≈15 words). Encode the near‑kiss seam and stroboscopic core echoes explicitly; use the JWST IR palette as two to three words (ember‑amethyst, sea‑glass halos) and forbid jewelry/planetary tropes. - Composition enforcement: Name the seam as the event (“razor interference seam”), call out “stroboscopic ghost‑trail echoes,” and demand “vast dark void” to let time read as absence. - Ontology guardrails: Add “no jewelry, no gemstones, no ringed planets, no neon” in-prompt to prevent ornamental artifacts. - Pipeline fix: Make Stage‑A caption mandatory; auto‑regenerate until a non‑empty description is captured. Reject outputs without explicit mention of “ghost‑trail,” “near‑kiss seam,” or “in