Making "Earth"

Next, I needed to find an image of the Earth. Since I work for a search engine company, this wasn't hard. In fact, we already had a licensed image available in our image gallery. [editor's note: dead link] I just searched for "earth" and selected the following picture.

In retrospect, this was probably not the best picture to select because the edges of the Earth are not very well anti-aliased (e.g., you see what are known as "jaggies" when you look closely at the image, particularly in the region at 2-4 o'clock). But I didn't notice that until later.