is there any way to draw a dome (half a sphere) using gluSphere or equivalent? im trying to get a realistic sky dome, and there really isnt any reason that the sky dome should be drawn under the ground. thanks for your help.

p.s.
i know that i could just model a dome, but i just think OpenGL should have some way of doing this.

Most of the time I don't think you need to use a sky-dome, a sky-box is usually sufficient and is a lot more efficient.

wouldn't the edges of a sky box be visible? that would look horribly unrealistic. but ill check it out anyway.

There's no reason for the edges of the skybox to be visible. It's all in the texturing...

so id have to distort the texture image so it conforms to a cube?

Generally you'd have a different texture for front, left, right, back and top. And remember to turn off lighting on the sky box.

If you're absolutely dead-set on drawing half a sphere, you could use a clip plane to cut a whole sphere in half.