Weekly digest
Pick the categories you care about: movies, AI launches, sports, eclipses, and major public dates. One email per week, and never anything you did not ask for.
Want full preferences? Customize your digest →
Annular path crosses central Chile and Argentina including parts of Patagonia, then sweeps the South Atlantic. One of the longer annular eclipses of the decade.
One of the longest annular eclipses of the 2020s at 7 minutes 51 seconds maximum annularity. Saros 131 produces these long annulars near aphelion.
Time to greatest eclipse
Peak in your local time: 2027-02-06T16:00:48Z
Peak UTC
16:00:48
2027-02-06
Magnitude
0.928
Sun diameter
Max duration
7m 51s
central line
Obscuration
86.1%
Sun area covered
Saros
#131
55 of 70
Gamma
-0.295
Shadow axis (Earth-radii)
Cities from the WorldClockTools clock catalog that fall in the central path or partial-eclipse band. Each link goes to the local clock page for that city.
Every phase of a solar eclipse outside of totality requires ISO 12312-2 certified solar viewing glasses or an equivalent solar filter on every optical instrument (telescope, binoculars, camera lens). The same standard applies to annular solar eclipses. Glasses can come off only during the brief totality window on the central path; they must go back on the instant Baily's beads reappear at third contact.
Central-line duration is 7m 51s. A typical imaging plan brackets exposures from ~1/1000s for the chromosphere and Baily's beads down to ~2s for the outer corona, fired in a programmable sequence so the observer can watch with the naked eye for at least the middle third of totality.
Local sun altitude, the path crossing time of day, and recent weather climatology drive site selection. NASA's interactive eclipse map (linked below) gives the exact altitude and time for any coordinates on the path.
Editorial dossier
Historical significance
The February 6 2027 annular solar eclipse delivers up to 7 minutes 51 seconds of annularity — placing it among the longer annular events of the 21st century. It is member 51 of 70 in Solar Saros 131, a long series that began on August 1 1125 and whose immediate predecessor — the January 26 2009 annular over Indonesia — produced 7 minutes 54 seconds of ring-of-fire totality, only three seconds longer. The path crosses Chile, Argentina and Uruguay before arcing across the Atlantic to Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria.
Comparison to other eclipses
This is the first of two visually striking solar eclipses over the South Atlantic / African corridor in a six-month window: it is followed by the August 2 2027 total solar eclipse, whose 6-minute-23-second totality across Egypt, Sudan and Saudi Arabia will be the longest land totality between 1991 and 2114. Saros 131 itself transitioned from total eclipses (last total: 1909) into a long run of annulars; the 2027 event is one of the last 'long' members before the series begins decaying toward partial eclipses in the next century.
Astrophotography context
Greatest eclipse occurs at 16:00 UTC, with a maximum annular band 282 km (175 mi) wide and 7 min 51 s of ring-of-fire duration centered over the South Atlantic. The Sun is high (~70 degrees) over central Argentina in the early afternoon local time and lower (~30-40 degrees) over the West African coast in late afternoon. For photographers: with annular magnitude 0.9281, the Sun's outer ring is thin enough that Baily's-bead effects appear at the start and end of annularity — use a solar filter throughout (this is never a 'safe to remove filter' eclipse), and plan a wide bracket (1/4000s to 1/60s through a ND5 filter) to capture limb darkening across the long ring phase.
Top viewing destinations
Sources
Eclipse data depth
Reference fields include Annular Solar Eclipse 2027-02-06: Saros context, magnitude / obscuration, path geometry, visibility countries, and city cross-references.
Data source: NASA / JPL
Eclipse data from NASA/JPL — Fred Espenak & Jean Meeus, Five Millennium Canon of Solar Eclipses and Five Millennium Canon of Lunar Eclipses (NASA Technical Publications NASA/TP–2006-214141 and NASA/TP–2009-214172). Public domain; re-published here with attribution.
NASA page for this eclipse (path map & circumstances)eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov
Greatest eclipse: February 6, 2027 at 16:00 UTC
