Every populated place inside the path of the total solar eclipse of 2 August 2027, with how long totality lasts there and what that costs against the longest totality anywhere on the path.
Local circumstances are computed from the Besselian elements published by NASA GSFC, following the method in the Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Ephemeris (1974) and Meeus, Elements of Solar Eclipses (1989). Nothing is traced from a map.
Computed with ΔT = 76.0 s, the value NASA publishes for this eclipse, based on Morrison and Stephenson (2004). ΔT is not perfectly predictable and shifts the path east or west: an older NASA map for this eclipse used 71.7 s, a difference of about 2 km of longitude. The figure used is shown in the page header so you can tell which one these numbers assume.
The Moon has mountains, which move the path limits by 1–2 km and duration by 1–3 s against the smooth-limb figures used here. Limb-corrected predictions are usually published 12–18 months before an event.
These are different points. Greatest eclipse is where the shadow axis passes closest to the centre of the Earth; greatest duration is where totality lasts longest. For this eclipse they are 0.6 s and about 215 km apart. Seconds lost is measured against greatest duration, which is the honest denominator.
All distances are great-circle. Circle membership is by distance, not by testing points against the drawn circle polygon, which would make places on the edge flicker in and out as you zoom. The radius is straight-line, and straight lines are not journeys: 120 km along the Nile and 120 km into the Western Desert are very different drives.
The computation is checked against independently published values before anything downstream is trusted.
| Check | Published | Computed |
|---|---|---|
| Greatest eclipse on the shadow axis | ~0 | 1.0e-5 |
| Sun altitude at greatest eclipse | 81.7° | 81.69° |
| Duration at greatest eclipse | 6m 23s | 382.5 s |
| Luxor | 6m 20s | 380.4 s |
| Countries crossed | 9 | 9 |
Sudan appears in some lists of countries this eclipse crosses. It does not: where the path is at Sudan’s longitudes the centre line is near 25–27°N, and Sudan’s northern border is at 22°N.
From GeoNames cities1000, filtered to populated places and
administrative seats. Coverage is uneven by country: 118 Spanish places inside
the path against 18 Libyan and 8 Somali. That is a fact about who edits
GeoNames, not about where towns are. A place missing here is missing from
GeoNames.
Population figures come from GeoNames as published and are not always the town: for some Egyptian entries they are the surrounding district, which is why Esna appears larger than Luxor.
ERA5 total cloud cover, 1985–2024, sampled at each place’s local eclipse hour on the eclipse date and the day either side. That is 120 observations per place, not 120 independent years, since consecutive days in one August are correlated.
ERA5 runs on a 0.25 degree grid, about 28 km. That is coarser than the terrain here: one cell can span the Nile valley and the desert plateau beside it, which do not have the same weather. Read these numbers as regional.
Checked against Jay Anderson’s satellite-derived figures at eclipsophile.com: Tarifa computes at 23.8% against his 26%, close agreement from an independent method and dataset. Luxor computes at 3.1% against his 0.7%, and Melilla at 25.3% against his 39%; both read high for the grid-resolution reason above. For a specific site Anderson is the better source. His tables are not reproduced here because they state no licence.
Climatology is not a forecast. A real forecast for 2 August 2027 will exist about a week beforehand and will be worth more than any of this.
An approximate count of somewhere you could sleep within 25 km and within 80 km, from OpenStreetMap. It answers one question: can you stay near here at all. Anything countable as a stay is included, whether it calls itself a hotel, a guest house, a hostel, an apartment or a hut. Campsites are counted separately.
It counts establishments, not rooms or beds. A 200-room hotel and a three-room guest house each count as one. Real room counts are not available: only 7% of these features carry a room count in OpenStreetMap, so any total built from them would be mostly guesswork.
No prices. This site holds none and scrapes none.
Two things to know when reading the numbers. Coverage varies enormously by country, 28,463 features in Spain against 1,314 in Libya, so counts compare honestly within a country and poorly across borders. And a 25 km radius around a village next to a city sweeps up the city’s hotels, so several places near Luxor show almost identical counts.
From the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, fetched when the dataset was built and shown with the date the FCDO last reviewed it. The advisory is attached to the country group, never to individual places, and nothing is hidden or reordered because of one. Where the FCDO names the specific regions an advisory covers, those are listed, because “parts of the country” without saying which parts is not useful.
The full dataset is on the map page as a CSV download. Corrections are visible in the git history.
The dataset is ODbL 1.0. Use it, change it, build on it, including commercially; if you publish a database derived from it, publish that under ODbL too and carry the attributions above. It is ODbL rather than something more permissive because the lodging counts come from OpenStreetMap, which is share-alike.
The code that produces it is AGPL 3.0.