Planets Collision
how it was done,
It has four layers
First Layer: black&white diagonal gradient, tile reflection, bulge (see plug-ins) and sharpen
properties: lighten, semi-transparent
Second Layer:(exploding star jpeg)
line it up with the impact point
properties: additive, semi-transparent
Third Layer:(orbital view of earth jpeg)
cut out background
properties: opaque
Fourth Layer:(long shot of earth jpeg)
cut out background, gaussian blur rough edges, invert colours
properties: opaque
finishing off:
fine tune transparency
apply glow to Layer 2
repeat glow to increase explosion effect
Animation
For the animation I flattened half a dozen frames, each with a repetition of glow on layer 2, and loaded them into ImageToAVI (freeware utility, makes movie from images).
Then I slo-moed and aged it in windows moviemaker