> But whatever I try, all I get is an empty black scene... I tried 
> tweaking the distance of the sun (Earth's center is at the origin), the 
> illumination direction, correctly applying rotations of mesh2, camera 
> position and camera direction, but no effect at all.

start small ... you seem to assume that the curved mesh itself
is correct which is a very big assumption for a first test with
such a complicated definition. Make a test scene where you render
some spheres at calculated vertex positions for a small subset of
coordinates to get an overview of your geometry.

And then start with a reasonable test sphere of maybe radius 100
for sea level and add elevations between 0.0 and 1.0 for testing.

Also, rendering a planet as high resolution spherical mesh
is admittedly cool but probably overkill. The Earth is pretty
smooth - on scales where the curvature matters you don't really
need true elevated geometry. A sphere with normals might do
the trick just as well.

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