POV-Ray
POV-Ray stand for Persistence of Vision™ Ray-Tracer, it is
a useful software to do realistic 3D animated images.
A powerful feature of this software is to run under various OS
(MS-Dos, Windows 3.x, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, Windows 95/98,
Windows NT, Apple Macintosh 68k, Macintosh Power PC, Amiga,
Linux, Sun-OS, UNIX and other platforms).
Further information is avaible on the POV-Ray web site, http//www.povray.org/
I have done the following pictures with POV-Ray 3.1 for
Windows.
The planet Earth rotating with a plane to view the
earth
I used a image of the earth (mercator map),
Earth.png , the file INI,
RotEarth01.ini which is calling the file POV, RotEarth01.pov

A red blob rotating in a back background
The file INI, RedBlob01.ini is
calling the file POV, RedBlob01.pov