Animating very distant objects

Hi all,

I have a question for the object gurus out there. I have an animation that I'd like to place in my scene and appear very distant. I don't believe any of the objects behave exactly as I want them to so I'm exploring mods. So far I've looked at fxSunlight, a distant static object with an IFL, and the skybox. Each needs some modification to do everything I have in mind. I'm after some guidance on which approach might be best, perhaps some snippets or links if anyone has done this before. I'm a designer and a Torque nub so please feel free to shout if I've missed something obvious. ;-)

Here's what I'm after - a distant animated planet (WIP):

* Tried fxSunlight: needs world alignment (the billboard's rotation is currently modified with the camera roll) and needs animated image sequence;

* Tried static object: needs visible distance override for this one object;

* Tried skybox: I don't particularly like the idea of animating the whole skybox for this one object;

Do you think an image sequence on some sort of world aligned billboard would perform better than a mesh? I'm looking at around 50 images in a loop (256x256 pixels).