Here's a special one with a tight range and collision-rejection turned off; I think you'll like it quite a bit. Sort of like they're flying in formation.
With a wider range of placements and collision rejection turned on it looks more like a random cloud than like a piece of art.
You'll also note (correctly) that this is slow as hell. I need to write some culling code, stat.
Also, you probably already realize this, but I think that unwrapping your planet as a box rather than a sphere would remove the pinching of the texture. But then of course you wouldn't be able to take advantage of texture wrapping... Maybe a Quincuncial uv mapping would work, although I have no idea how to actually apply that at the moment.