Most eclipse shots have to be taken at high speed so you don't blow out the sun. Since I was bracketing some of my shots, this is taken at a much slower speed, 1/6th of a second. As a result, it is a bit blurry as you can't hand hold easily at that speed but I also get more of the color of the sky, which for this eclipse, was brighter than I expected. A fellow member of the Naperville Astronomical Association speculated that this eclipse was brighter than normal as the high thin clouds were reflecting light giving us a dark, but not completely dark, eclipse experience. Notice the contrails along the bottom right corner. I hope they got an eclipse view from the plane.
A more heavily edited version of this same shot is below. I darkened the sky to bring out detail that the camera captures within its dynamic range. Your eye does this naturally. I can't remember which of these two shots is more "real". I think the sky color in the first shot is as I remember with the disk of the sun being covered by the moon more "real" in the more edited shot.
There is no one right way to edit a shot. Even in the film world, you could choose between different film stocks which could emphasis and pick up different colors in a scene. Fuji film was famously richer in color than Kodak. Same with digital. Their is no real. There are only choices. I try to stay closer to what I saw (which is more a combination of these two shots) with my colors usually a little richer, ala Fuji Film, which was my favorite choice in the film days. I try not to over process the colors and in the more edited shot above, I turned down the blue color as it didn't look like I remembered.
