For the research on my planet renderer I have been looking into how icospheres are constructed. The process is rather simple:

Define the triangle edges with three intersecting planes that use the golden ratio (1+sqrt(5))/2 : 1 Create 20 triangles between the vertices of those planes: Subdivide those triangles and keep them in the shape of a sphere by making sure the distance from the center is the radius of the sphere:

There is barely a noticable difference from how icospheres look like when adding them via the Add Mesh menu in Blender:

The nice thing about icosahedrons is that they use equilateral triangles of the same scale everywhere, so they have a nicely distributed amount of surface detail, so it might be quite ideal for rendering of planets.