Events · September 29, 2026
Eleven Months From Now, the Longest Total Eclipse of the Century Passes Our Doorstep
Fondateur de SkyChart
On Monday 2 August 2027, late in the morning, the Moon's shadow will enter the Atlantic, cross the Strait of Gibraltar, run along the North African coast and climb the Nile valley. At the most favoured point, near Luxor, the Sun will stay switched off for 6 minutes and 26 seconds. No total eclipse will do better before 2114, and none has offered so long a totality to dry-land observers since 1991. It passes two flight-hours from Paris and London: this file opens today, eleven months out, because the good vantage points are being decided now, not next July.
Maximum obscuration on 2 August 2027, computed point by point. The green band is totality: it grazes Gibraltar, 4 min 29 s of darkness, and Oran, 5 min 11 s. To the north, the percentage gives the fraction of the Sun covered: 86 % in Madrid, 73 % in Marseille, 51 % in Paris, 34 % in Berlin. Algiers, at 99.81 %, stays in daylight: this close to the band, the last hundredth changes everything.
SkyChart illustration
City by city: totality or nothing
The lesson of every eclipse is brutal and sits right there in the table: obscuration does not add up, it tips over. At 99 % it is still daytime. At 100 % the corona appears, stars come out, the temperature drops. Seville, at 98.3 %, stands 71 kilometres from night; those 71 kilometres are all the difference in the world.
| Place | Maximum (local time) | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Luxor | 10:05 UT | Totality, 6 min 25 s, Sun at 82° |
| Mecca | 10:26 UT | Totality, 5 min 11 s |
| Tangier | 09:46 | Totality, 4 min 54 s |
| Gibraltar | 10:46 | Totality, 4 min 29 s |
| Cadiz | 10:46 | Totality, 2 min 53 s |
| Malaga | 10:48 | Totality, 1 min 51 s |
| Seville | 10:47 | Partial, 98.3 % |
| Madrid | 10:51 | Partial, 86.2 % |
| Marseille | 11:02 | Partial, 72.6 % |
| Toulouse | 10:58 | Partial, 72.4 % |
| Lyon | 11:02 | Partial, 62.7 % |
| Paris | 11:01 | Partial, 51.2 % |
| London | 10:00 | Partial, 41.8 % |
| Brussels | 11:03 | Partial, 43.3 % |
| Berlin | 11:13 | Partial, 33.9 % |
In Spain everything happens in the morning with the Sun already 38 degrees up: comfortable, photogenic, and at the hour when coastal haze burns off. It is Spain's second totality in twelve months, after the one of 12 August 2026 that grazed the country's north at sunset; 2027's is longer, higher and safer.
Why it lasts so long
Three coincidences stack up. The Moon passes perigee that very morning, at 06:24 UT, four hours before maximum: its apparent disc is at its widest. The Earth is only four weeks past the 5 July aphelion: the Sun is at its narrowest. A very large disc in front of a very small one makes a wide, deep shadow. Finally the band runs near the tropic, where Earth's rotation carries the ground at high speed in the same direction as the shadow: the shadow seems to slow down, and totality stretches. Luxor's 6 minutes 26 approaches the theoretical ceiling of the exercise, 7 minutes 32.
What to decide now, and what can wait
- Now: the place. The Andalusian coast between Cadiz and Malaga will draw an immense crowd, and accommodation inside the band is already being booked. The Tangier-Luxor axis offers the long durations and the statistically safest August skies. Eleven months is the right horizon for a reasoned choice rather than a June compromise.
- Now: plan B. You watch an eclipse where the sky is clear, not where the hotel is paid for. Line up a fallback zone within two hours' drive along the band.
- Can wait: the kit. Glasses certified ISO 12312-2 cover every partial phase, everywhere in Europe, and they will cost the same in June. Beware only of last-week stock-outs and uncertified fakes: we will come back to this.
- Can wait: photo technique. One piece of advance advice all the same: for a first totality, the best instrument is the naked eye. Two to six minutes go terrifyingly fast.
This file will be kept current until the day itself: detailed city timetables, site selection, weather statistics, eclipse safety for children, all of it. France and Britain, for their part, get a handsome mid-morning partial, and it will have its own guide in due course.
What these figures do not tell you
Totality durations are computed by our ephemeris engine with the conventional lunar radius; the Moon's real limb profile, its mountains and valleys, shifts the contacts by a few seconds, and the fine predictions published next summer will fold that relief in. Obscuration percentages are fractions of area, not impressions of brightness: at 51 %, Paris will barely notice anything without glasses, the eye compensates prodigiously. And while eleven months of celestial mechanics carry no uncertainty at all, eleven months of weather do: the only firm promise is the time, to the second, for every point on the globe. The SkyChart sky map will give you yours, when the moment comes.
This article was translated from the French edition by AI, then reviewed before publication. The figures are not translated: times, durations and percentages are computed by SkyChart and are identical in both editions.