How can you create a sphere in POV-Ray that looks like Earth? Presumably the answer would involve taking some kind of map of Earth and somehow wrapping it around a sphere as a texture. A Google search got me as far as http://www.physics.sfasu.edu/astro/courses/phy315/povray6.html but when I tried following the directions with the supplied files, the result is garbled; the texture doesn't seem to be wrapped correctly.
I never used povray but a simple google search led to this page (where you can download the pov-planet sources) and about 2 minutes in the povray manpage resulted in
povray -Otest -Iplanets-1.pov
which in turn produced an test.png with some planets.
You can try this as a starting point.
(POV-Ray 3.7.0.1.unofficial @ archlinux 64bit)