A few days ago, NASA shared a photo of Earth taken from the Orion capsule on the way to the Moon. I couldn't stop looking at it — so I opened Blender and tried to recreate it. Deep blue ocean, layered clouds, atmosphere glow, aurora, stars. All built from scratch using procedural shaders and Geometry Nodes. This is the full hi-res render, the Blender scene, and a few key points from behind the process.
For the clouds, I built a layered shader system using Noise Texture as the base — multiple independent node groups, each with different scale, distortion, and emission strength. Combined together they create that natural, organic cloud coverage you see on the real Earth.
The stars are fully procedural using Geometry Nodes — Mesh to Density Grid, Grid to Points, Instance on Points with a tiny Ico Sphere. Random Value nodes control both position scatter and size variation.
The aurora is a circle mesh with an Inset face and extruded thickness, driven by a Spherical Gradient Texture as a mask and a Noise Texture shifted to green for the emission. Two separate aurora layers — top and bottom — combined with a base glow through Mix Shaders, each controlled independently with a Multiply node.
Post-production is all done inside Blender using Power Grade. Contrast first, then Hue Correct to push the blue tones, followed by Noise, Glare, Lens Distortion and Vignette to imitate real camera artifacts. Final touch — a White Noise Texture in the Compositor for film grain and Diamond Sharpness to bring everything together.