I agree about the halo. It was airbrushed onto the matte painting, but in the top image (which is based on the 1997 SE recomposite), the upper part of the "two-tone" effect is way too visible, making it look much more like a painting. I'm not faulting Harmy, of course - as I indicated before, the scene was digitally recomposited in '97, and the halo effect doesn't show up the same way it did in the original optical composite.
Here's a frame from -1's test capture of the flyover:
Obviously, the painting looks much more diffused, partly because of the generational loss and increased contrast that isn't in the recomp which came directly from the separate elements, but I'm guessing it's mostly because of how the painting exposed in the original composite. The halo glows more and (IMO) looks better than either Harmy's version or your retouching. (And actually, it also looks better to me than the GOUT version of the '77 flyover, which looks kind of drab and flat.)
I'm obviously not criticizing Harmy. Besides working from the '97 recomp, he doesn't have an IB reference for this scene because all of the British IB prints had the Episode IV crawl and recomposited flyover spliced in, on regular Eastman print stock, for the 1981 reissue. So not only is the flyover on the IB print not the original, it's also faded to a nice pink tinge as well.
Also, there's been some talk about how the starfield seems almost total black on the left side - this is true on all versions of the actual '77 flyover (including the GOUT). Besides the generational loss, the light level seems to drop off on the left side of the entire background layer (look at how the aforementioned atmospheric halo seems to fade out). If you look closely, the stars *are* there, but they're so dim that it just looks like a black void.
Look at Harmy's version - even with the stars so visible and luminant, you can see that the left side is still more sparsely populated than the other two thirds, and that a lot of the stars are little pinpoints. Both the multiple generations of duping and the odd light dropoff on the left made those stars virtually invisible by the time the scene got to the projection-print generation. It wasn't until the '77 flyover was recomposited for the SE that the stars on the left side became visible - in fact, they may be more visible on Harmy's version than on any official version.
(Does anybody know if the starfields were brighter on the '97 theatrical prints than on the '04/'11 transfer? For that matter, how do they look on the '97 video transfer?)