Our backyard's not so bad, really...
Experiments in rendering planets - tricky due to sheer size, especially for the atmosphere layer, given that the real-life scale would make any 3D program weep. So some clever hacks were employed to get more-or-less accurate Rayleigh scattering. Didn't quite turn out how I was expecting, but definitely something to work on further...
Textures were courtesy of NASA's free 3D Resource site.
There were in total, five separate spheres overlaid and masked on top of each other. In order from inside out: ocean floor (diffuse), ocean (volumetric scattering + volume absorption), land layer (continents displaced with details), clouds (subsurface scattering, volume scattering, displacement) and finally the atmosphere, which was a volume scatter using a custom light splitting material, created using nodes in order to approximate planetary atmosphere scale.
In Photoshop, the continent textures were modified to create a gradient on the edges, in order to simulate shallower waters near the coast.
The emissive pass for the night side was masked with the daytime side using a simple gradient texture.
