RobCaswell

Classy! Very cool composition and your ship elements are handled nicely. For me there are two serious flaws. First and foremost, the lens flares are way overdone and interfere with the true subject elements in several areas. This may have been compounded by your decision to use the flare twice: once on the star, then on the atmospheric limb. The results stuffs the image up with visual artifacts that obscure the shuttle and cause a odd lightened box around the star.

Technically lens flares are an artistic flourish. As such they should be applied with care. If you're doing your postwork in Photoshop I recommend putting your lens flares on their own (black background) adjustment layers. Then set that layer's blending mode to SCREEN. You can then apply a layer mask to control the extent of your visual artifacts, or you can play with the color by doing a hue/sat shift on the layer. The key is is gives you all kinds of vital editability that just dropping a lens flare on the image doesn't normally allow.

Second, your atmosphere looks like a spherical shell, not a gaseous envelope. It needs a softer edge. Composition's dynamite, though. We don't see enough verticals for my taste so I welcome this one.

I'm always looking for any excuse to add color. B&W high contrast space is dullsville

I think the pod pylon gives the illusion of being off center because you visually read it as sitting on the back of the saucer.... but it connects further back than that, one the end of the secondary hull. It messes with your brain

The stories I could tell!........