Learn to Photoshop
How it was done

• Starting with the sky for the background, it was rotated a little and given some motion blur. All right, you don't get clouds in outer space but we are not dealing with realism here.

• The white clouds were given a colour by adjusting Whites in Selective Color. A black-clear Gradient darkened the sky from the top.




• The first circuit board was treated with the Spherize filter at 100% to make it look like a ball. The resulting circle was cut out with the circular Marquee Tool.
  Some people might have the 3D Transform filter installed under Render, from the Photoshop CD. This can be used to modify the globe further.
  The globe was colorized with Hue & Saturation.

• A Gradient shaded the sphere from left to right, while the extra highlight on the left was created with Lighting Effects set to Spotlight.
  The crescent was made on a new layer with two circular Marquee selections of different sizes. After softening with a feather, the crescent was filled with black then set at an opacity of 80%.

• The sphere was selected by Ctrl + clicking / Cmd + clicking on its icon in the Layers palette. The right edge of the crescent was trimmed sharp by the shape of the sphere.

• The sphere and crescent shadow were merged, then dragged on to the sky image. It was resized with the Transform.




• The second circuit board was turned into a sphere in the same manner, and a similar crescent shadow created.






• Now the rings.
  Several lines of text were written, all with l and O to represent the binary code.
  The text was converted to a normal layer via Layer > Rasterize > Type.
  To change the text into an elliptical shape, the lines of text were filtered with Polar Coordinates > Rectangular to Polar.



• The result was positioned over the second globe and after a suitable angle was found, part of the text was erased to make it look like rings around a planet.
  This image was dragged on to the main sky image, positioned and resized.






• The first circuit board was used again for the foreground. Users with CS3 and beyond have the Warp Tool, and options like Arc Upper can give the right sort of curvature. Pre CS3, the object can be rotated 90 degrees and the Shear filter can create a curve. It is then rotated back again.
  The Gradient Tool was used to darkened the right side of the surface.

• The curved surface was copied and the lower version was given a large Gaussian blur. To add to the glow, a band of white was placed behind the top edge of the surface foreground, curved with the same filter, blurred with Gaussian blur and reduced in opacity.

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