I wanted a glowing space image for my desktop background, so I quickly made this in blender.
All I did was created a sphere, added a displacement texture and backlit it with a blue light.
Then I added a circle(for the ring of light), gave it an emit texture, mixed that with a transparent texture based upon an image texture. Then I used a circular gradient to make it fade out along the edges.
After a little blurring in the compositor based upon either diffuse direct or emit I was done.
