Planets are made with the aid of Google Earth. I stitcht 8 images together in Photoshop, for both planets I used the same texturemap. I added city light with the aid of a starbrush, the road were created by making line and in the selection I used the same starbrush.
The background comes from The Gathering II, but I applied a radial zoom blur of 8 to it. The satalite is a custom brush, I downloaded a set, but I cannot find the site anymore, so if anyone know, please fill in this cap.