Spiky Halo Effect

Open a new pic 800x200 > 16 mill colours > white.
Set foreground/background to black/light grey
This is the point where you will need to be creative and do something better than me.
Choose the paintbrush tool set it as in the pic below and paint away as in the pic.

Next: Gaussian Blurr set to 12, should look as pic below.

Next: Effects > Geometric Effects > Spiky Halo (Thanks to Maegg for putting me onto this)
Settings as in the pic.

And hopefully you should end up with something like this pic.

Next: Colors > Colorize > Hue = 136 Sat = 180

It's up to you where you go from here. A couple of examples

Rust background > no blurr > spiky halo as above >
layers > new adjustment layer > levels - mess with the brightness

Blended background > spiky halo > tiny 2x2 selection in center >
Eye Candy Corona gives the slight central glow