I also placed a radial light inside and grouped it to the 3 spheres that make up the sun. Then I stuck the Earth and a "deathstar" in the shot moved things around and adjusted my radial light until I was happy with it. I wasn't going for a finished work here or versimilitude of nature, but just testing the effect. I also added a second radial light to the scene (shadows off) in order to add some ambient light. I realize it's turned up too high, but again, this was only a test. Think of it as the full moon reflecting light back on the dark side of earth. What do you think? And the whole sun object, light and all is only a little over 61 kb in size. The pic took about 5 minutes to render on a 2 gig Pentium4 with render settings at 64. What do you think?

This is not my "second childhood". I'm not finished with the first one yet.

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

"I'd like to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather....not screaming in terror like the passengers on his bus." - Jack Handy