Allright, getting to the finishing touches here. This part will add the moon and the rings.

The Moon:

This bit is easy. If you look at part two, and follow the tutorial at the mottom you should be able to come up with a smalle plaet, in grey looks best normally, to use as the moon. Shade it and add a white atmosphere. Position it where you want it and you have the moon!
Rings come next. For these, I made a new smart object, and re sized it to 1500x1500 and filled it black. Then i rendered clouds and used the twirl filter on 999% twice.

If you want, at this point you can add some noise to the image to make it a bit mroe gritty.

Ok after that i erased the edges and the center, thus making rings, and returned to my original doccument. I set the new layer to screen and transformed and rotated it to look like rings.

As a side note, any you will see below, rings and moons normally orbit arround the same plane, ie the equator. More or less. I try to keep this in mind a bit when I make planet photos, but feel free to ignore it.

Ok, after adjusting the color balance of the rings layer, and masking out the part behind the planet, here is what I got:
Alright, now for the finishing touches, and then you get to see the final image.

Sunrise is important. Apply the image to a new layer and use the dodge tool to lighten spots on the horision. Then (for convenience) mask out all the other bits that werent changed. This give you mroe flexability to post-edit. Then use a linse flare on a black layer set to screen to make the bright horison.

The final image I made is below. Look out for the galaxy as a tutorial sometime later this week.


Enjoy!