I updated the image with a new render so you may need to refresh the page to see the new image. Let me know if you think the atmosphere is still too large.
Ahh, looks much better. I think it's still a bit chroma/blue though. The real atmosphere is a bit lighter/whiter from this angle, as it only looks blue to us looking up/out due to red scattering in the atmosphere. Otherwise, this is MUCH better!
And the render time has now jumped to 200 hours
For the whole animation or a still?! I hope it is for the whole animation, hehe. Welcome to CGI! I have a 12 CPU render farm behind my sofa.

Seriously though, you might want to check you anti-aliasing settings. Your instincts might me to max those out, yet the textures should render anti-aliased by default and you actually have no hard polygon edges to compensate for because the atmosphere covers them up. Hopefully, some 10 frame tests at much lower settings will make things easier on ya with some lower settings.
Lovely work, mate. Kudos.