Kamil - I use an Olympus E10 for the photography; Bryce 4.1 for generating the globes; and Corel PhotoPaint 9 for image manipulation (changing hue, saturation, contrast, sharpness, etc.) and bringing all the different components together into one pic.
Scott - for a detailed explantion of how I handled the planet (no - I don't use a 10,000,000mm zoom lens) refer to my posting "Jupiter Rising" of 4-24-02. That explains the sphere - now the surface photo (foreground plain and mountains in the above picture) was a straight-forward shot I took in New Mexico last December and then composited in front of the sphere and star-background (which was computer-generated). Hope this encourages you a bit! Sorry for the delay in getting back to you.
Hi Frank. I really like your space photos and would like to know... what is that zoom you use ? or better yet what would I need if I wanted to photograph the planets ect ?