This was heavily inspired by 's tutorial. i just read through the tutorial and went off to my computer tlater that day. i didn't follow it exactly because i wanted to make it, in a way, my own. i liked the ray traced shadows more than his area shadows, and i put caps at the end of the glowy holes. This is not MY idea! . this is basically a ripoff of his work and i wanted to share with you the fruits of my labor.

i also learned an interesting thing. skylight works about 40 times faster when you simply click "Light Tracer" in adv. lighting. it cut my render of a 640 by 480 pic from 1 hour 3 min to about 2 min.

EDIT: i added a nice glow to the slits in the sphere and i gave the black a metallic specularity.
1024*768 resolution
Adv. Lighting Light Tracer with ray traced shadows
450 Rays per sample
adaptive undersampling to from 8*8 to 1*1
Render Time 6:01