Well the rendering is 'fake' 3d. The planet is rendered in a 2d post-process shader by using an equirectangular projection which maps the planet texture to a sphere in screen space. I think I'm using the generated normal of the "sphere" (it's not a 3d sphere but just some screen space math). The rotation of the different layers (planet, clouds) is done by simply adding an x offset to the coordinates. The other UI elements were drawn on top of it. It's all done in "processing" (that java library/ide thing), although the main aspect of it (planet, stars, lighting) is just a big glsl shader.

The assignment was to make some kind of "artistic" visualization of time. I just went for a dynamic planet (because it's rather easy to get something that looks good, haha) with a stylized clock around it. Here's a screenshot:



There's also some slight, fancy animations. But I didn't feel like recording a video.
( Also ignore that the day of the week is wrong )

edit: I think this is a good example implementation of the equirect. texture -> sphere algorithm
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/MlfSz7