Greetings,
I would VERY much like to model something like this in Blender. I’m a weekend warrior that has been using blender long enough (I think) that if someone pointed me in the right direction, suggested some methodology, I would like to try and tackle a project like this. Any creative help would be appreciated.
Greetings! That’s definitely a cool effect! It’s going to take learning smoke simulations, lense flares and learning some compositing for sure! Shouldn’t be too hard. I would suggest heading over to Blenderguru.com and searching for Smoke Simulation, Lense Flares and Compositing and see the tutorials there or try YOUTUBE as well! Hope this helps you! 
Wish you the best!
Just a suggestion:
Maybe it’d be easier to compose something like this completly in 2d. Photoshop/Gimp with existing material (Photos of explosions/smoke, lensflares…) Might be a more ‘economic’ way to achieve such an effect. Meaning you won’t have to go through the process of rendering that smoke sim.
You’ll have to do some 2d comp work anyway…
This video could help you understand how to achieve an explosion effect in cycles with the smoke sim, if you decide upon the 3d route that is
Video is a little old, but most of the info should still be valid
You would probably have to tweak the settings a fair bit to get the results you are looking for, but this is a good starting point i think.
Then after that, as others mentioned, it will be down to some fairly heavy composition to get the desired after effects shown in the reference image 
thanks for the replies. I hope I can do it in Blender. I have not done a whole lot in Gimp. 