Personal challenge, find an intuitive method to give this aliasing at any range with a single pass. 
That’s a fun one and I bet you learn a few cool things.
There are a couple hacky solutions to this, a couple industry standard methods and maybe one or two you might figure out on your own.
Honestly that’s a gold mine of knowledge when it comes to rendering, at least speaking from personal experience.
can anyone here tell me how to get the edges of a mesh in the node material editor
@TheScientist not totally sure what you are trying to achieve but usually it is done by applying a Sobel filter: https://halisavakis.com/my-take-on-shaders-edge-detection-image-effect/ Image Effects | Part 4 - Edgy Talk
GLSL Fragment Shader: Sobel Edge Detection · GitHub
Been a bit since we’ve seen one of these, so let’s see YAPE - Yet Another Planet Earth Node Material.
This beaut has built-in cloud animations, uses most PBR nodes, and best of all - the textures were provided by the kind folks at NASA!
I’m open to feedback on how to make better use of some of the textures – for instance, I don’t think I’ve been using the specular map correctly - and I’d be interested to see how a better lighting setup might improve the look as well (larger light radius, intensity, etc.)
epic topic!!!
It’s already a good base. Thx for sharing. This can be very useful actually.
I hope others will want to may be add their own additional touch.
If I get a chance, I may want to have a look at it and add/edit some clouds. In other words, remove the clouds and create a clouds ‘layer’. May be with a combination of opacity texture and emissive? We’ll see…
It’s mostly a work of textures and lights now, but the base is here.
Again, a great effort. I luv it.
Thank you for saying that! I did end up putting this into a PG with a somewhat realistically modeled light setup here
Ed: regarding the clouds, a previous version done in code using PBR material made the clouds show on the dark side, so emissive might not work for that, but for city lights…
Yes, the emissive will require light (obviously). That’s why I said ‘may be’. It was just some quick design thinking. I was only thinking of giving some more ‘volume’ to these clouds and a bit more of a dynamic alpha/opacity look n’ feel. Something more ‘lively’. But from your new PG I can see this part has already been worked and improved 
Again, really cool. Thanks for that.
