Creating a realistic Earth as seen from space

In this recipe, we will create a realistic Earth as shown in the following screenshot, using both image textures from the Web and some procedurals:

Creating a realistic Earth as seen from space

The Earth as it appears in the final rendering

Getting ready

The image textures provided with this Cookbook have generally been heavily down-scaled and are good for demonstration purposes only (in this case, for a very distant Earth render). For better results with this recipe, replace these low-resolution images with high-resolution versions that you can find at these addresses:

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