Note: The blend file renders better than the pic cuz the pic has been compressed…
Im not sure why Im doing this and I don’t expect many people to be interested but here it is:
http://mysite.iptic.com/madcow/Betterspace.zip (1 meg due to textures)
Ohhhh, cool…
The Starred Sky with Nebulas is really cool.
Neighbouring star is cool too.
Planets… well…
You clearly used the same texture for both… you coud use two different 
Small planet is much lit and receives light from the right.
Big planet is lesser lit and it too takes light from right… but star is on the left? Is there a bighter star off image to the right?
Planet borders are too sharp, they are gaseous giant planets, theyr edges shouls smoothly blend to the void of outher space.
keep it up!!!
Stefano
<edit>P.S. I will be happy to download it!!!</edit>
are you kidding? I was looking for this for a long time! i was wondering if you could write a tutorial about this so I can put it on my Blender CD (spoiler!)
Hi, M@dcow
Damn… I can’t download your zip!
I’ll retry after… I’m to much interested in it.
Env
Yeah, thats right. The reason for this is that another texture would have made the .blend file about half a meg bigger and I didn’t want that.
I’ll admit that the planets were a secondary consideration, In fact, I probably could have done without them altogether. 
Also, your right about the lighting. I wasn’t aiming for realism with this, otherwise I would have used a sun lamp instead of a hemi lamp. As I said, the planets were an afterthought 
The blend file is more of a focus on how to get a decent starfield with a bit of nebula action!
Anyway, thanks for the great comments…
No need! Check out: http://www.ap3d.com/ for the best space tute around. The rest of the stuff in the file is pretty simple to figure out.
Look for the Betterspace tute, It has the best method of painting nebulas that I have found so far.
Great file. Thanks for sharing.
BgDM
I agree with BgDM.
Thanks, M@dcow.
Env
now i have one question about starfields that has been bothering me for some time now.
if i have a camera moving?animated in a star field now matter how i set it up the stars seem to be in 3 dimensions when on a small scale stars don’t really move in relation to each other.
i know one way is to put a whopping great shpere but i don’t want to do that.
is there another way
thanks (i hope you can answer this one you expert you!!!)
Set the MinDist in the World Star setting to somethin much greater than your camera path. (Say > 20 times it)
Remember to set ClipEnd for camera to something GREATER than that!!!
Stefano
Wow! That light in backround looks awesome :o
Is there a finished tut for space anywhere? I am using a giant black colored box just to get idea… heh…
Whoa dude, You’ve completley lost me. Why would you want to use a giant black box???
As for the tutorial, I don’t think anyone has made one (I may be wrong) because creating space scenes is actually very simple. It’s just a case of creating a completley Black world with “Stars” set to on.
Check the .blend file, Hopefully it will help