I hitchhiked to Madras to get into the totality zone.
It would take some kind of “high dynamic range” photography to get a good picture of the corona. But beyond that, things you don’t see in these photos: The sky was not black. It was a twilight blue. Logically the dark side of the moon should have also been this same dark blue color, but the moon totally looked black. It must have been an optical illusion created by the relatively bright inner edge of the corona.
