A little over a year from now – on August 27, 2027 – we will experience a solar eclipse lasting over six minutes.  Six minutes and 23.2 seconds to be precise, if you happen to be standing in Northeastern Egypt.

You know, where the Great Pyramids are.  (Queue A&E mysteries music).

In fact, Luxor will be a fantastic place to see this, and there’ll something rather mystical about standing in the midst of a 5,000-year-old civilization and watching the sky invert itself.

If you miss it, there will certainly be other total solar eclipses in the 21st century – there’s 68 scattered throughout this century, though 55 have already passed.  The next one is only a couple days from now, on August 12.  Interesting that our present century is so front-loaded, as 81% of total eclipses this century have already occurred.  The August 27, 2027 eclipse is the longest of the remaining 2000s.  The next one that’s longer won’t be until June 3, 2114, clocking at six minutes, 32 seconds.

Total solar eclipses won’t last forever.  Over time, tidal acceleration will move the Moon far enough from Earth that total solar eclipses are no longer possible because the Moon won’t be close enough (big enough in the sky) to completely occult the sun.  Fortunately, that won’t happen for about 600 million years.

raindog308

raindog308 is a longtime community LETizen, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, raindog308 runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, raindog308 has a life-long love of German Shepherd Dogs, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, playing guitar, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.