Hello everyone! This is my first post on this forum and I hope to post more in the future 
Feel free to critique as you see fit, I’m hoping to learn more as I go.
This is something I’ve been working on for the past year or so, and something I have been slowly gaining the skills to work on for about 3 years. I wanted to focus specifically on trying to recreate the Earth with as much photorealism as possible.
Here is the final render:
There are several things I learned about making a realistic Earth along the way, specifically with Rayleigh scattering. To give an idea of how much this project has evolved, this was my first render, about a year ago:
It’s a start, but not quite there in terms of photorealism. To achieve this, I used high resolution 16k textures from NASA for diffuse, specular, bump, and the cloud layer. The major thing was the atmosphere, which I combined the volume scatter and volume absorption nodes to create, using a method I found on another forum. I would link it, however I am not allowed to put urls into posts (as I have less than ten posts). You can find it easily by typing “cycles Rayleigh scattering” into Google. It should be on stack exchange. Here is the node setup for the surface material:
