Where the Shadow Fell

2026 · Self-initiated · Honorable Mention · Awwwards

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.

Project sheet

My role: Everything, solo. Concept, astronomy model, design, code.
Data: NASA Five Millennium Canon of Solar Eclipses (Espenak and Meeus): 11,898 eclipses from 2000 BCE to 3000 CE. Stars from the HYG database.
Built with: Three.js for the globe, Mapbox for City Sky. Every shadow path computed, not traced.
Award: Honorable Mention, Awwwards, September 2026.
When: 2026.

How it works

The opening, as it runs on the site. It is the introduction and the explanation in one. The Sun fills the screen, an eclipse forms over it, the camera pulls back, and the globe turns twice while all 11,898 eclipses land on it in order, from 2000 BCE to 3000 CE. By the time the controls fade in you have seen what the atlas is made of.

The saros-inex lattice, every eclipse in its own cell — The catalogue as a grid. Saros runs across, inex down, and every eclipse sits in its own cell, coloured by age. A saros repeats an eclipse after 18 years and 11 days, an inex after 29 years less 20 days, so reading along either axis is how eclipses are predicted. Click a saros or inex number to light that series up on the globe, or type a saros number to jump to one.

The globe with the Next 50 years view selected, each eclipse labelled with its year — Preset views. Five ready-made questions sit under the search box. This one is Next 50 years: 116 eclipses between 2026 and 2076, each marked on the globe with its year.

Paris selected on the globe, with the card listing its next eclipse — Find your city. Search a place, or choose it on the map, and the globe centres on it with every shadow path that crosses it. The card gives the next eclipse worth looking up for, the last and next total ones, and a chart of everything seen from there between 1700 and 2100. For Paris the next one is 2 August 2027 at 11:01, with 51% of the Sun hidden. The last total eclipse was in 1724, the next comes in 2081.

City Sky over Sydney at totality, the 2028 eclipse crossing the dark sky in phases — City Sky. Step into a city and you stand in it, looking up: every eclipse that reaches that place hangs where its Sun stood, at that height, on that bearing. Pick one and it plays out over the skyline. Here Sydney on 22 July 2028, totality at 14:01, and the sky goes dark at midday.

The downloadable city card, shadow corridors only, with no type on it — The downloadable card, one per city. Shadow corridors only, no type. The Earth clips each corridor at the limb, and the disc itself is never drawn.

Spin the globe ↗