Animated GIF for Rotating Earth

An animated GIF made with povray.
It is a stack of 15 spheres, each slightly larger than the other, and slightly different pigment:
pigment{
wrinkles
pigment_map{
[n/max color transmit 1.0]
[n/max color mapcols(n/nmax)]
}
scale 0.125*1.5}

Where a is a number that goes from 0 to 1, and mapcols is a linear spline that I used to set up my colors.