fenerit wrote:
Indeed there should be a must-have utility you could doing: a program which shows the changes in real time of the Mie/Rayleigh parameters; both for 3D orbiting and surface views...

Well as a reminder, ChrisL wrote an interesting tool, called
scattersim. It is a tool for experimenting with techniques for simulating atmospheric scattering. It uses a simple (and slow) ray tracer to render atmospheres using equations based on Nishita's. Atmospheres are simulated with three populations of particles: Rayleigh scattering, Mie scattering, and absorbing. The scale heights and scattering coefficients can be set separately for each set of particles in a cfg file.
The code will be part of
celestia.Sci and can be built also for Windows like so
nmake /f scattersim.mak CFG=Release
And run it with
scattersim earth.cfg
There is also a MAC version.
In this long Mie thread of mine,
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=116, I led a long dialogue with ChrisL about scattersim. If I find a little extra time or more people to help developping
celestia.Sci, I am sure I could add more useful Mie features to scattersim. Currently the scattersim archive contains Mie parameter config files for Earth, Earth-thick, and two Titan configs. Moreover, 2 Makefiles vor Windows and Linux, respectively.