I’m working on this fairly simple scene of an asteroid heading towards Earth. The glow of the atmosphere around the Earth isn’t ideal, it doesn’t look as if it has much depth to it. I can’t think of a way to fix this other than adding a larger sphere around the earth and adding a glare effect to it. I can’t decide which of the 3 images feels the best in terms of scale and positioning of the rock and the planet. I would like to add the Sun coming over the Earth, towards the top right corner if possible.
Well, I like the first one the best, but the Earth looks bad…
Have you followed Andrew Prices tutorial?
If not, here it is…
http://www.blenderguru.com/videos/create-a-realistic-earth/
Thanks for the link! I’ll see what I can do to improve.
I know!
use halo + volumetrics
Need a tutorial?
Do you mean using a spot lamp behind the earth in Blender internal and compositing in the halo effect in Cycles? I probably would need a tutorial haha 
no nodes
So, on sphere quick smoke, then add small halo material on sphere,remove particle based volumetric layer or uncheck it, set everything inside the sphere to accept transparent shadows in the shading/shadow/transparencyshadowy thingus so its not blocked out, set the radius and density low on the smoke and halo and sub-divide it alot, mess with this with emmission etc and you can animate real atmosphere, I am still working on it
Scale the smoke domain to 1,1,1 so it is actually the size of the sphere, for smoke scaling, next go into edit on domain, resize so its enclosing the object, turn down physics for heat and density on the smoke domain and then adjust your dissolve rate so the smoke goes away gradually then…
play with it!!!
add particle based smoke with vortex+gravity to planet+collision = storms!!
Looks pretty good! Might be a little advanced for me I think though. Also not sure how to do the receive transparent setting in Cycles
its just one map of the moon that was freebie, as a displacement on a sphere, and then halo+smoke and the water is done with noise+mirror
No cycles here, or nodes 