Pale Blue Dot - well, maybe not quite so pale

The Earth below is a little better, though not perfect. I made it, the moon and the stars in Maya while I created the clouds in After Effects. I also did a small bit of color correction in AE to desaturate the blues - although I think more attention to color is needed here. The Earth and moon are NURBS spheres with high tesselation to get a smooth edge. The Earth's atmosphere is made with fluids. And the sunlight of course comes from one directional light. Although this is only a still frame, the Earth modelled here is fairly large - with XYZ scale values just shy of 4700 - in case I animate any camera moves with hero objects such as a starship (I've given a name to my pain and it is parallax.) This was rendered using Maya's software. Mental Ray produced an undesirable grid pattern on the planet - I'm not sure why. Have a click for a closer look...