Tools used this time were entirely free. Terragen was used to generate the landscape, sun, sky any most of the picture. Apophysis is a fractal generator and was used to generate the swirls and coronas around the sun and permeating the atmosphere. The GIMP and the GIMPshop extension (because I prefer the emulated photoshop interface to the default GIMP one) were used to composite the images together to get the end result. Due to the limitations of the software in its free state the end image was 800x600 at best but that seems plenty big enough. The entire image took about an hour (half of which was rendering time) including research.
