Most people who have stood in the Moon’s shadow and experienced a total eclipse will tell you the same thing… that it was over too soon.

The total eclipse that crossed North America in April 2024 gave you about four and a half minutes at the very best, and for most people rather less. The one before it, in 2017, offered barely two. 2 minutes is just about enough to be gone before your brain has quite caught up with your eyes.

That’s where the solar eclipse 2027 comes in and why it’s the one people will be talking about for, well, the century. 

On 2 August 2027, the Moon’s shadow will sweep in off the Mediterranean, cross the Libyan coast, and simply stay there - for a good few minutes! Near the centreline in eastern Libya, totality runs close to 6 minutes. Actually a little over 6 minutes! A little further along the track, near Luxor in Egypt, it reaches its maximum of 6 minutes and 23 seconds. 

When you think about it, that’s honestly a pretty absurdly long time to stand in the dark at midday.

So, that means the total solar eclipse in 2027 will be the longest total solar eclipse anyone will see from land for well over a century. 

To understand why (both why it’s so long, and why it won’t be matched again until the 2110s) you need only to understand a bit of geometry and a sense of where you’re standing on the planet. (Hopefully in Libya for the Solar Eclipse 2027)! 

Here we take a small masterclass in how the solar system works, and why it’s the whole reason we’ve built a trip to Libya around this particular patch of desert.

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How Long is a “Normal” Eclipse Anyway?

What is ‘Totality’?

Totality is the few minutes when the Moon completely covers the Sun and the corona blazes out around a black disc. That’s the iconic solar eclipse picture you see. It is never guaranteed to last long. 

How long does totality last?

Theoretically, when everything aligns perfectly, is can be around 7 minutes and 32 seconds. 
In practice, most total eclipses deliver somewhere between two and four minutes, and plenty are shorter still. 

How does totality happen? 

The Moon’s shadow is racing across the face of a spinning planet at thousands of kilometres an hour. How long it lingers over any one spot depends on a handful of variables that rarely all cooperate at once. Except for 2 August 2027, when the moon and planet cooperate beautifully. 

Here’s how…

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The Importance of Size

The single biggest factor is the apparent size of the Moon compared with the apparent size of the Sun. The bigger the Moon looks relative to the Sun, the more comfortably it covers it, and the longer it takes to slide all the way across. 

Following so far?

Both of those apparent sizes change through the year, because neither the Moon’s orbit around the Earth nor the Earth’s orbit around the Sun is a perfect circle. They’re ellipses.

Take the Moon first. 

Its distance from us varies by roughly 12 to 14 per cent between its closest point (perigee) and its farthest (apogee). At perigee, it looks noticeably larger in the sky. This is the “supermoon” you’ll have seen multiple headlines about. 

In early August 2027, the Moon is near perigee. It is, in effect, a big Moon.

Now the Sun. The Earth reaches aphelion. This is its farthest point from the Sun. It reaches this point in early July each year. So, through July and into early August, the Sun is at its smallest apparent size of the whole year. It is, in effect, a small Sun.

Put a big Moon in front of a small Sun, and you have a great recipe for a long eclipse. The moon will be overlapping the sun pretty generously, giving a fair bit of margin to spare. And with that margin, we get more time! 

This is the heart of it, and it’s why NASA points to the Moon’s perigee and the Sun’s summer distance when explaining the extraordinary length of this event.

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The Importance of Speed

The second factor is speed. We have to take a look at how fast the Moon’s shadow travels across the ground beneath it.

The dark core of the shadow that produces totality (called the ‘umbra’), is always moving. But its speed over the ground isn’t fixed. 

The Earth is rotating eastward, in the same direction the shadow is travelling, and near the equator the surface is moving fastest at around 1,600 kilometres an hour. In effect, the ground there is chasing the shadow, narrowing the gap, so the shadow appears to crawl rather than sprint quickly. Stand near the equator and totality lasts longer for that reason alone.

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The Importance of Time

There’s a related bonus when the eclipse happens near local noon, with the sun high overhead. At that moment the shadow is falling almost straight down, taking the shortest path through the atmosphere. You as an observer are about as close to the

Moon as you’ll get that day. So, this helps to nudge the apparent size of the Moon up a fraction more.

The 2027 path threads across North Africa at low latitude, around the middle of the day. So the shadow is already dawdling when it reaches Libya and Egypt, and tyou’re standing beneath it. 

It all comes together on 2 August 2027.

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Total Solar Eclipse in Libya

So if we stack all of these factors together, the a large Moon, a small Sun, a low-latitude path, and a near-midday crossing, you get a shadow that lingers for a long time. In this case, over 6 minutes.

Path of totality

The path of totality is about 258 kilometres wide, and it runs from the Atlantic west of Gibraltar across southern Spain, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and on toward the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa. Something like 89 million people live inside this path. Before you count the travellers heading in to whitness it, of course! 

Duration of totality

Duration climbs as you move along the track toward the point of greatest eclipse, which sits about 60 kilometres southeast of Luxor in Egypt. There, totality peaks at 6 minutes and 23 seconds. 

Eclipse in Eastern Libya

The stretch around Benghazi, on the centreline sits close behind Luxor in Egypt, with totality lasting close to six minutes.

What sets Benghazi apart as one of the best places to experience the solar eclipse in 2027 is that it has some of the clearest skies historically with anywhere on the path. Cloud records single out western Egypt and eastern Libya as having virtually no cloud risk in early August. A clear sky is arguably almost as precious as the duration itself. 6  minutes of totality is worth very little through a bank of cloud, after all.

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Why “longest until 2114”?

You’ll see the 2027 eclipse billed everywhere as the “eclipse of the century”.

So, is it really?

Strictly, the longest totality of the 21st century belonged to the eclipse of 22 July 2009, which reached 6 minutes 39 seconds. But that maximum fell over the open Pacific, and the longest stretch of that eclipse over land was on North Iwo Jima. A remote, uninhabited speck you can’t visit without special permission. As a practical matter, almost nobody could stand in the longest part of it.

The more realistic claim for the 2027 total solar eclipse is that it’s the longest total solar eclipse visible from accessible land since 1991, and the longest until 2114. 

A gap of 123 years on either side. So, a pretty important event, either way. 

The 1991 eclipse ran to 6 minutes 53 seconds across Hawaii and Mexico. The next eclipse to beat 2027’s land duration doesn’t arrive until 5 July 2114. In between, nothing you could reasonably travel to comes close.

So “once in a lifetime” really does reign true here. 

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Where to see the Total Solar Eclipse in 2027?

That largely depends on you. The crowds will gather in Spain and along the Nile. It’s a much more curated experience and you’ll be alongside lots of travellers. Both of these places are very easy to visit.

But if we’re maxing out adventure and totality, the centreline (the very middle of the shadow, where the six minutes are longest, and the skies are clearest) runs through eastern Libya, across a historic coast most travellers have never set eyes on. 

That’s where we’ll be! Exploring eastern Libya for the total solar eclipse 2027 in Benghazi, Ancient Greece and the birthplace of the man who measured the Earth. 

See you there? 

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Koryo Tours
Libya Group Tours