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.
This does a better job of showing the detail: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fi... But you can tell they had to crank up the exposure because the space doesn't look nearly as black in this one.
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.
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.
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.