A while ago, I noticed something with most space simulators. I could see the polygon edges of the planets. For some reason, this bugged me, so I opened up Blender to try a different way to deal with this problem. The result? Plane-t.
http://indreams-studios.com/g_dragon/plane-t.blend
Note: The blend was created in the latest svn version of Blender. Although, the file should still work in Blender 2.45.
an almost perfect fake 
only problem I see is that the texture blurs out and seems to move on the right in animation…
other than that the result is truly amazing…
fergot to pack data…methinks 
The only image that should be packed is the normal. I decided to not include the displacement because the warp was doing some strange stuff. Then again, the warp could fix the texture issue. Layers two and three should have a plane and half a sphere for recreating the displacement texture.