Where the Shadow Fell

2026 · Self-initiated

An interactive atlas of 11,898 solar eclipses, 2000 BCE to 3000 CE. Pick any place on Earth and see every eclipse its sky has seen or will see: a personal view of five millennia, from your own city.

Spin the globe ↗

The task

Self-set. It started with a map of the 12 August 2026 eclipse on Instagram, a single band drawn across Europe. The obvious question was what the other eleven thousand look like, and there was no atlas that answered it.

The result

An interactive globe of 11,898 solar eclipses, from 2000 BCE to 3000 CE, live at eclipses.bogachev.fr. Every shadow path is computed rather than traced, and City Sky puts the eclipses of one place into that place’s own sky.

My role: everything, solo. Concept, astronomy model, design, code.

11,898 solar eclipses
2000 BCE to 3000 CE, fifty centuries
Arranged by the saros cycles that govern them
City Sky: the eclipses of one city’s own sky
Saros across, inex down, each eclipse in its own cell

Process

The first frame of the intro, one crescent against a bright sky — The first frame of the intro: one crescent, one year and a nine-second run from 2000 BC to 3000 AD.

Six candidate drawings of the Sun marker, each at 0, 50 and 100 per cent obscuration — Six candidates, from the corona to the diamond ring, judged at the size the marker is actually drawn at.

The globe of eclipses on 25 July 2026 — Day 7. The frame already holds the whole catalogue, but it has no way of letting you in.

The globe of eclipses on 7 August 2026, from the final visual set — Day 20. Four ready-made questions under the search box, a cold FUTURE end to the scale, cities labelled right on the sphere.

Paris drawn from extruded OpenStreetMap buildings — Paris by approach 1, extruded OpenStreetMap buildings, day 8.

Saint Petersburg as a sepia photo panorama — Saint Petersburg by approach 2, a photo panorama in sepia.

The Eiffel Tower as a traced silhouette, three broken peaks — The Eiffel Tower as a traced silhouette: the place where that approach stopped being defensible.

Real 3D Paris at night with the 2026 eclipse in the sky — The prototype from that same night, with the 2026 eclipse at 92% obscured.

The marker for a partial eclipse drawn as a checkerboard at full ink — The checker at full ink: it reads like the transparency checkerboard in a photo editor.

The marker for a partial eclipse as it finally shipped — The variant that shipped, after the marker swung five times in thirty-one hours.

The city card open over the globe, Paris — What the entrance became, once every mode and tab had gone.

The downloadable city card, shadow corridors only, with no type on it — The title of the work taken literally: the Earth clips the corridor at the limb, but the disc itself is never drawn.

The loading plate at fifty per cent — The indicator is the Moon crossing the Sun, and the percentage is how far it has gone.

The saros-inex lattice, every eclipse in its own cell — Saros across, inex down, each of the 11,898 eclipses in its own cell, and the holes in it are real.

Spin the globe ↗ Making of →