More practice with planets and such. The water was done with the water reflection script from the registry. I like it quite a bit.

i find it hard to comment here, it looks so perfect
love all the rust colours
would make a great wallpaper !

one thing that doesnt work 100% for me is the reflections
i dont think you would have that much detail in the reflection, when the saturn kind of planet is that far away
you can see all the texture from the planet in the reflection

maybe smooth it out before applying the script ?

More problem with the reflexion... by definition the reflections should be symmetrical with regard to the horizon (which is what was done for the rings...). Bu the sun and tje small moon are far from that and even the ringed planet isn't completely right.

I agree about too much detail in the reflection. In particular I doubt the rings would be visible and in any case they would blur heavily in the distance.

<astronomical correctness nazi>
The rings should cast a shadow on their own planet, that would show as a dark line across the crescent, and the planet should cast a shadow on its rings. Refer to the imagery from the Cassini-Huygens mission.
</astronomical correctness nazi>

[irony on]could you say fascist instead of nazi, pls[irony off]

Very nice Ek22.

Looks good to me, like a scene from a sci-fi movie. Nice work.

Looks cool Ek22!
As the others have mentioned, I too feel the reflection may contain more detail then necessary.
Nonetheless, if you edit it or not it's still a fine piece of work.

Thanks for the comments everyone. I've had the reflection both ways, straight up just flipped half a layer and it was worse than it is now. So I squeezed the water layer by about 1/4. I agree that there's probably too much detail and next time I attempt something like this I probably will give the flipped layer a gaussian blur before I water it. As it sits, I messed with this one too long to want to go back in and fix it right now so it will probably stay the way it is. But there's always another one soon. Like has been said, I can't quit doing it.

Recursive Median might also work

I'll give that a try.

That is the most important thing, to not stop being creative.
I really like the result myself.
<ANTI-CRITIQUE-STAtEMENT>Besides who's to say that planets reflections appear different than here on Earth. Maybe the water refraction is not the same. Could be many causes for different reflections to not look correct right? Light bending in certain ways even.
Well that's my </ANTI-CRITIQUE-STAtEMENT>

Haha Rod, it's fine. I don't mind a little constructive criticism. It helps me work out the bugs. Really, it just makes me want to do better next time. But yeah, maybe the water can be liquid mercury or something and thus it's like a big mirror or... I should have blurred it lol.

ek22: wow, this is your best space scene so far, i think! i love the colours and as usual the clouds and stuff looks great. i think the composition looks good too, not so much "lined up" as some of your early ones. and i don't bother about details such as reflection, i think anything is possible out there (a bit like rod suggested).

Thanks for your kind words AnMal. I agree with you to an extent, artistic licence should probably go pretty far in an imaginary field like that, but I do like the idea of 'This could happen.' Like, if I look at it I want to be able to see myself there, like in an imagination spaceship or whatever. It's hard to explain. I want a certain balance between fantastic and realistic. I'm getting closer and all your comments here are helping tremendously.