About the project
Where the Shadow Fell
Every solar eclipse from 2000 BCE to 3000 CE, placed on the globe at the point where it peaked, and, if you name a city, the handful of them that reach your own patch of sky.
What it is
The globe carries 11,898 points, one for every solar eclipse in NASA’s Five Millennium Canon of Solar Eclipses. Each sits at that eclipse’s greatest: the place where the Moon’s shadow axis passed closest to the centre of the Earth. The shape of a point is the type of eclipse, how full it is tracks the magnitude, and its colour and brightness say when it happened: recent ones warm and bright, ancient ones cool and faint.
Hover a point and the piece draws the path that eclipse swept across the world. For every total, annular and hybrid eclipse in the five millennia, this is the real track of the shadow, not a sketch of one.
Then there is the personal layer. Name a city and the field narrows to the eclipses that actually arrive there: how much of the Sun each one takes, when totality last stood over that place, when it will next, and the whole set laid out along a timeline. Step through into City Sky and you are standing in that city, looking up, with each eclipse hung where its Sun really was, at that altitude, on that bearing, over that horizon.
The four kinds of shadow
Every eclipse in the record is one of four kinds, and what separates them is a few thousand kilometres: whether the tip of the Moon’s shadow reaches the ground, stops short of it, or misses the Earth entirely.
That there is anything to separate is a coincidence. The Sun is about 400 times wider than the Moon and about 400 times farther away, so the two discs come out very nearly the same size in our sky. A few per cent either way — and the Moon’s distance swings by more than that every month — is the whole difference between a black Sun and a ring of fire.
Each kind is set out here in two steps: the geometry that makes it, and the Sun as it looks from inside the mark that geometry leaves. Between them stood a third figure once — the band, blown up on its own patch of ground — and it went on 3 August 2026 («what lands on the ground выглядит вообще бессмысленно, я бы убрал совсем»). It was right about the tone and said nothing the corridor does not say better in place, on the globe, at the size it really is. The numbers it stood for are all still here, in the words.
On scale. Nothing in the geometry column is to scale, and no diagram of this kind ever is. Against the real distances the gaps are about 25 times wider than drawn: the Sun stands 107.5 solar diameters from the Earth and the Moon 110.7 lunar diameters, against 4.5 and 4.8 here, and the bodies are out of proportion with them. What that column does keep is the topology — where each cone ends, and what that means for the ground — and that is the only claim it makes.
Total
The Moon is near enough that its shadow cone still has width when it arrives. The dark tip — the umbra — lands on the Earth and draws a narrow corridor across it, and inside that corridor the Sun is not dimmed but gone, so the corona, which is always there, is finally visible. The band the globe paints is solid at full ink, and it is the reference the other three are read against: it is the only one of the four that fills its corridor completely. The second figure puts the Moon where it belongs: in front. It was drawn for a long time as an absence — a ring of light with the paper showing through the middle, on the grounds that the Sun there is not dark but gone. That is true of the sky and false of the drawing, which read as a spoked wheel rather than as one body passing over another. The disc is the same ink the Moon takes in the first figure, and the corona around it is uneven for the reason the real one is: it is brightest in the equatorial streamers and thin over the poles.
Annular
The Moon’s distance swings by about a tenth over its orbit, and near the far end of that swing its disc is simply too small to cover the Sun’s. The cone closes to a point before it reaches us; what lands is the antumbra, the cone’s continuation, opening out again. A ring of photosphere stays around the Moon for the whole of it and the light never fully leaves. So the band is the same shape as a total’s, filled limit to limit, and differs by a ceiling it can never pass: its own obscuration. Across the 3,956 annulars in the catalogue that ceiling runs from 0.824 to 1.000, median 0.907. An annular is about a tenth lighter than a total, and the tenth is the ring. The ring in the second figure is drawn at its true proportion, and the proportion is the catalogue’s own: magnitude 0.9523, the median across all 3,956 annulars, whose square is exactly the 0.907 the band sits at. That makes the ring about one part in forty of the Sun’s width. It is thinner than the picture most people carry, and the figure does not thicken it.
Hybrid
The rarest kind, and the only one that will not hold still. The cone’s tip falls almost exactly at the Earth’s distance, so the Earth’s own curvature decides: where the surface bulges up to meet the tip the eclipse is total, and toward the ends of the track, where the ground falls away past the vertex, it is annular. The piece assigns that change station by station, from the record’s own geometry rather than from a guess. What the band does with it is worth saying plainly: a hybrid’s annular ends sit between 0.98 and 1.00 of a total’s ink, which is not a difference an eye can find. On the globe a hybrid looks like a total. In the sky it is two eclipses — and the ring drawn in the second figure is an annular’s, since a hybrid’s is thinner still: a thread, from a vertex that fell only just short of the ground.
Partial
The dark tip misses the Earth altogether — the axis passes above or below the globe — and only the penumbra, the part-shadow, falls on it. There is no path of totality anywhere in the world that day; from the ground the Moon takes a bite out of the Sun and no more. The band here belongs to the city layer, where the piece knows where you were standing, and it is a continuous grain: every cell in the corridor carries ink, from 0.34 to 0.86 of a shipped quiet factor — 0.7209 for a past eclipse like this one, 0.6070 for a future one — clumped by a hash of each cell’s own position rather than ruled into a lattice. A checker shipped here once and was thrown out: at one spacing it read as the pattern an image editor draws for empty space, and it claimed half the corridor had no shadow at all, which is false — inside the penumbra the light thins everywhere. A density that carried the obscuration outright was tried too, and also thrown out — it made the faintest kind of eclipse the loudest thing on the globe. The rule that replaced both is that the pattern says which kind of shadow arrived and the weight says how much it mattered, and a partial mattered least, so this is the quietest band in the piece by construction: the heaviest possible partial still lands under the lightest possible total. The Sun in the third figure is the record’s own median partial, magnitude 0.4728 across all 4,200 of them — just under half the Sun’s width taken.
Solid, ceilinged, screened, or travelling between the first two: the pattern says which kind of shadow arrived and the weight says how much it mattered. The umbra and antumbra carry the obscuration itself, as depth; the penumbra is one screen at one weight, held deliberately below them. And within every one of them darkness still means time — older eclipses fainter, recent ones darker.
The rings at the poles
Two rings stand out on the globe, one around the Arctic and one around Antarctica, where the points crowd close together. That is real, and it is one kind of eclipse doing it. All 4,200 partial eclipses in the record sit at high latitude. In a partial eclipse the Moon’s shadow misses the Earth: its dark axis passes above or below the globe, and the moment of greatest eclipse is marked where that axis comes nearest the surface, which is always near a pole.
The total, annular and hybrid eclipses, whose shadows do reach the ground, fall everywhere else, across the tropics and the middle latitudes. The rings are the eclipses that only grazed the Earth, collected at its two ends.
One family, one saros
Eclipses don’t repeat at random. Every one in the record carries a Saros number: the family it belongs to. Members of a family recur roughly every 18 years, 11⅓ days, each time landing about a third of the way further west than the last. A family begins near one pole as a string of grazing partials, then matures into a long run of totals or annulars that can last well over a thousand years. It ends the same way, fading back into grazing partials as it reaches the other pole.
The eclipse of 12 August 2026 belongs to series 126. Seen all at once, across the whole five millennia rather than at its own moment, a family stops looking like scattered noise in the field and resolves into one drifting diagonal chain: the same alignment, returning, generation after generation. Every third return comes back near the same meridian, a step further along.
The day is the subject
An eclipse happens in daylight. That is the whole strangeness of it: the light goes out in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, and then comes back. So the piece rests in day: a warm, bright, starless world where the eclipses read as small dark marks, shadows on a lit ground.
Darkness only arrives when an eclipse does.
Hover a total and the daylight drains away, the real stars come out, and the black disc with its corona stands exactly where that eclipse peaked. Let go and the day returns. Day, twilight, day: it is the interaction and the argument at once.
What is computed, and what is not
The catalogue is NASA’s, by Fred Espenak and Jean Meeus, covering −1999 to +3000. Its 11,898 records (date, position of greatest eclipse, type, magnitude, duration, Saros series) are read verbatim; nothing is smoothed or filled in.
The shadow paths are not traced by hand. They are forward-modelled from the Canon’s own Besselian elements, the shadow axis intersected with the Earth ellipsoid, by the method in Meeus’s Astronomical Algorithms, chapter 54.
The same geometry does the personal work, and this is the part worth stating plainly: when you choose a city, the piece solves the local circumstances at your coordinates, rather than simply reporting what type the eclipse was somewhere. It works out how much of the Sun was covered there, at what hour, and whether the Sun had even risen. An eclipse total over the Pacific is a shallow partial over Paris, and the card says so. Eclipses whose Sun never cleared the local horizon are dropped rather than counted.
Sun positions in the city sky (altitude and azimuth for one place at one instant) are computed the same way, with the gap between Terrestrial and Universal Time carried explicitly, because over five millennia it grows to hours.
The stars are real stars: every one down to naked-eye magnitude 6.5, 8,920 of them, at their true positions, with their true brightness and colour.
What the corona is, and what it is not
The corona that appears at totality is an illustration, not a photograph of the eclipse you are hovering. No eclipse here wears another eclipse’s corona.
What it obeys is real. Its radial falloff follows the classical white-light measurements of Baumbach and van de Hulst. Its overall shape follows the solar cycle: round, with streamers at every latitude near maximum; flattened into wings, with polar plumes, near minimum. That cycle is driven by the observed sunspot record, month by month back to 1749. Its fibrous micro-texture is derived from a real photograph of a real corona, flattened and stripped of its large-scale structure so that only the grain survives.
Outside the record, the piece makes no claim. For an eclipse in 1200 BCE or in 2400 CE nobody counted the spots, so every cycle-dependent feature collapses to a neutral middle: the corona is drawn, but it argues nothing about a Sun no one watched.
A note on dates
Dates before 15 October 1582 are Julian-calendar dates, as published in the NASA canon and as historians write them: the Thales eclipse is 28 May 585 BCE. From that date onward they are Gregorian.
Sources and licences
Made by Alexander Bogachev, 2026.
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