I stumbled on this site here And used the info to create a dynamic earth desktop background. After playing some more with the documentation for xplanet I got a nice little moon with the current phase rendered.
I posted allot of the code I used in the rendering here: http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=13976879&postcount=3389
The gas buddy script is here: http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=13097794&postcount=3083
The crossfit script is here http://xtacocorex-geektool-scripts.googlecode.com/files/crossfitgetwodv1.2.py and the info to use it here: http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=13325664&postcount=3210
The rest I pretty much got here :)