This simple shot turned out to be a good bit more difficult than I expected, but I'm actually kind of glad for that because I had to figure out a few new tricks to make everything work.
The first attempt was *okay,* but I really wasn't happy with the lighting on the ship. It looks better in lower light, but I needed to crank up the sun intensity so the planet would look right. Additionally, the camera movement looked a little jerky to me.
The solution was obvious: render the planet and space background, then lower the sun light and render just the ship on a transparent background, then combine them in video editing software. Also do all this at 30 FPS instead of 24 to smooth out some of that jerkiness.
However, while "just render it on a transparent background" SOUNDS straightforward, and in fact CAN be under certain circumstances, it becomes significantly more complicated when you want that transparent background to include bloom/glow. So while the second render attempt did look much better, the engine glow was very noticeably cut off at the edges of the ship render. Turns out rendered frames can't have bloom on a transparent background because of some technical junk I only really understood about 1/3 of when I tried to look up how to make Blender do the thing it apparently can't really do.
What I did instead was just render yet another layer of just the emission output, which basically made sort of a mask to go over all the parts that are *supposed* to glow, then I added the glow to that layer in Premiere.
Overall, a fun challenge and great compositing practice.
Final Render
First try. Lighting isn't right, and the camera movement is jerky.
Non-rendered rough.