A few months ago I decided to implement atmospheric scattering in my OpenGL renderer in order to create a day/night cycle.
This turns out to be a fairly cheap effect to calculate if you do not need it to be completely accurate of implement multiscattering. One of the early GPU gems books had an implementation of atmospheric scattering that creates an accurate enough representation. The book is now online and the article can be found here.
This article comes with sample shader code for the implementation, but this ended up raising some larger issues in regards to the depth buffer. In order to keep the atmosphere to scale I wanted to render a planetary scale sphere. In order to do this I increased the distance of the far clipping plane. Since the near plane of the projection frustum is situated at 1 meter away from the camera and the far plane is 300,000km away pretty much everything in the frustum was flickering in and out of view. Instead of using a linear depth buffer like I was, I switched to using a logarithmic depth buffer which allows for a far greater range by concentrating most of the accuracy of the depth buffer closer to the near clipping plane. I used the vertex shader implementation demonstrated on the Outerra Blog and this fixed the flickering issues that I was having.
Finally in order to make it seem like a planet in space, I needed to implement a space sky box. The most trouble that I had with this was locating the tools to create the cube map that I would use for the sky box texture. I ended up finding a great tool named Spacescape that I could use to design space sky boxes (although I ended using one of the included samples). In order to get the generated .png files into a cube map I used ATI CubeMapGen. This allowed me to conveniently load in each .png and place it in its correct position, then export the cube map as a .dds file. I did not have much trouble from there since I had already loaded .dds files in previous work I had done. I just needed to render a cube with inverse winding order without any translation based on the view.