Monday, August 2, 2027
For six minutes, the middle of the day goes dark. A field guide to the longest total solar eclipse on easily reached land this century.
11:40 · Luxor, Egypt
First contact.
The Moon takes a small bite from the edge of the Sun. Nothing else changes. Without eclipse glasses you would never know.
An hour of waiting
Half the Sun is gone and the day looks the same.
Your eyes adjust faster than the light falls. For more than an hour, the only show is the one in your glasses.
Look down
Under any tree, the ground fills with crescent suns.
Every gap between the leaves works like a pinhole camera. Each spot of light is a small picture of the Sun, bite and all.
Move through the light. Click to scatter it.Drag through the light. Tap to scatter it.
Ten minutes to go
The light turns silver.
Colors go flat. Shadows sharpen to a knife edge. The air cools, the wind drops, and birds head home to roost.
Scrolling or the arrow keys move through the six minutes of totality.
13:02 · Second contact
Luxor · 82° above the horizon
13:08 · Third contact
Totality
The last sunlight breaks into beads along the Moon's edge. Then one. Then none.
Glasses off. For these minutes, and only these, it is safe to look.
That pale crown is the corona, the Sun's outer atmosphere. It is always there. This is the only time you can see it.
Venus, Mercury, and Jupiter come out at one in the afternoon. The horizon glows like sunset in every direction.
Six minutes is a long time for an eclipse. Most last two or three.
One bead of sunlight on the far edge. Glasses back on. The day returns in seconds.
14:26 · Fourth contact
And then it is an ordinary afternoon again.
The Moon slides off over the next hour and a quarter. Nobody is watching. They are already talking about the next one.
Scrolling or the arrow keys travel the path from west to east.
The path
The shadow's road
The Moon's shadow is a spot at most 258 km wide. Only inside it does the Sun go fully dark. It runs from Cádiz to the Horn of Africa in a little over two hours.
Time in totalityMid eclipse, local time
Watch safely
Four rules for the day
- 01
Certified glasses for every partial second.
Look for ISO 12312-2 on the frame. Sunglasses do not count, and neither does a phone camera.
- 02
Glasses off only in totality.
When the last bead of light goes out, look with bare eyes. When the first one returns, cover up again.
- 03
Be inside the line.
A 99 percent eclipse is not 99 percent of the experience. The corona only appears at 100.
- 04
Plan for the heat.
Luxor in early August passes 40°C (104°F). Bring shade, water, and a hat before anything else.
days to go
Be somewhere on the line.
Miss it, and the next ones are July 22, 2028 over Australia and New Zealand, and November 25, 2030 over southern Africa and Australia. Neither comes close to six minutes.