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UPDATE: small hue correction on the dome, saturation and sharpness tweaks and watermark.

The Earth's original atmosphere was primarily helium and hydrogen. Heat from the still-molten crust, and the sun, plus a probably enhanced solar wind, dissipated this atmosphere. About 4.4 billion years ago, the surface had cooled enough to form a solid crust, still heavily populated with volcanoes which released steam, carbon dioxide, and ammonia. This led to the early "second atmosphere", which was primarily carbon dioxide and water vapor, with some nitrogen but virtually no oxygen. As this second atmosphere cooled, much of the carbon dioxide was dissolved in the seas and precipitated out as carbonates. The later "second atmosphere" contained largely hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide. The low density and lack of too many suspension particles in this early atmosphere allowed for a magnificent view of the Universe in the nighttime, when the Sun's closer light no longer outshone the more distant stars. This image is a recreation of that sky over a modern landscape, to portray what it would be like if we could have been here 4 billion years ago, when life had yet to begin.

Even though I made this, I find it quite humbling to look at. If our sky were still like this in the nighttime, we'd probably have a very different concept of our importance in the big picture.

The foreground picture was taken on my infamous trip to Curitiba to watch the Iron Maiden concert. The spacescape is a picture of the Carina Nebula, taken by a Nasa space satellite at a whooping 423.4 Megapixels. Since my poor little computer couldn't even open the 479 MB TIFF picture file, I used a version that was modified for use as a Compiz Skydome by OpenDesktop member Matiee [link]. If anyone wants this nebula skydome, it's Carina 4 on the linked page. There you'll also find the link to the original image in Nasa's website. I later found out that Matiee also has a DeviantART page! Find him at ~Matiee and take a look.

Please download the full image to have a better look at the details, since setting the zoomed-in preview size too high may inconvenience people with smaller monitors. It took me a few hours to cut out the sky between the branches and in the windows, and the pool reflection was very tricky to replicate because of the fountains. By the way, the left tower reflection is bigger in the original image too.

Comments (positive, negative or neutral) will be greatly appreciated!