This took a while to decide which version was best. Decisions, decisions! Should the crystal be non-glowing, medium glow, or high glow? Does not having the moon take away from the scene? Is the Bryce CG starfield sufficient or do I need to handmake it? This takes half a day to render at 800x600; can I change some settings to give the same effect with less render time? (Praise God the answer to that one was yes; by removing shadowing and some other stuff, the final version only took 51 minutes to render at 1600x1200, and looks just as good.)

Likely I will finish the non-glowing crystal version of this scene; it gives a somewhat different feel.

The Bryce starfield was fine on 640x480, but for large renders it was obvious the stars were just circles of different sizes and intensities. It looks terrible. So I decided to manually create a starfield (Greg Martin has a wonderful tutorial on this.)