Negative Sagan, You are ordered to assume a perpidicular course to the plane of the eliptic at all possible speed. Godspeed to the Heavens, Sagan. I read the discription of the topic and thought astronomical event.
Okay lets make the sun go nova.
So this is my memorial to him. I has woking around with halos and wasn't satisfied with a linear map. The earth and the moon are both hi res image maps and lots of processing to turn the image maps into bump maps. Also I used the image map of the earth and created a 3 texture material map, ocean, land, and ice. The husk of the sun was done with a standard colormap halo.