It's entirely a natural lighting spectacle, so it's hard to capture the size and dynamic range on an LCD screen.
The pictures make it look like some sort of lens flare, but it looks nothing like that in real life. You can actually see the vapory tendrils of the suns' plasma making stringy loops around the sun in the pattern of the magnetic waves. There's a lot of detail.
Again, it's something you have to see for yourself. If you lived an entire life in a cave, me showing pictures of the sun would not have the same effect as actually feeling the light.
I was a skeptic when I went to the 2017 one. I've booked flights to go see next month's.
I had always assumed that corona photos like this are heavily processed in order to maximize the effect and that seeing one in real life would be more like "Eh, there's a sort of little ring thing in the sky."
Nope. During totality, the whole sky goes dark and you look up and there's a fucking ring of fire in the sky.
It looks exactly like these photos, just sitting there up in the sky. It feels like you got teleported to another solar system onto the surface of an alien planet.
Totally. The second I experienced totality, I instantly understood how it would have been a religious, cosmic experience for early humans who didn't have a scientific understanding of what's going on.
Imagine just going about your day as normal and all of a sudden the sun does that.
https://www.google.com/search?q=sun+corona+during+solar+ecli...
With things like this it's always so impossible to tell if everybody is altering the brightness and so forth.