Here is my composite image of the 2017 total solar eclipse, from a range of exposures from 1/1000 second to 0.4 second, to retain details in the inner corona while bringing out faint streamers in the outer corona fading off into the sky. The blue sky contains several stars, including first magnitude Regulus at left, a rare sight at any eclipse.

The disk of the New Moon illuminated by Earthshine is also faintly visible.

As such, the image shows a bit more than the eye saw, as the Earthshine is usually not visible to the eye, as it is overwhelmed by the bright inner corona.

However, in other respects I have tried to retain a more “natural” appearance to the merged images, to replicate what the eye did see, both naked eye and through binoculars. I’ve avoided a more garish or overly sharpened image, as interesting and scientificially useful as those can be for revealing the finest structures in the corona.

The location was the Teton Valley north of Driggs, Idaho off the West 5000 road on the Wydaho Lane.

I shot the images through a 106mm Astro-Physics refractor with a 0.85x Reducer/Flattener for an effective focal ratio of f/5 and focal length of 500mm. The camera was the Canon 6D Mark II, at ISO 100. The telescope was on a polar-aligned equatorial tracking mount. Even so, some manual alignment of images was required, mostly due to the motion of the lunar disk relative to the Sun.

This is a composite of 7 images blended with luminosity masks applied using ADP Panel+ Pro extension for Photoshop. Adjustment layers of successively smaller High Pass filters were also added to bring out the coronal structure.

I tried both merging images with HDR software (Photomatix Pro 6) and with stacking images as a Smart Object and applying a Mean stack mode. While both methods did produce a good result the HDR image exhibited edge artifacts, as HDRs often do, while the stacked smart object lacked detail in the inner corona, and allowed no control over the relative contr