The eclipses India will see through 2035, city by city
India’s next total lunar eclipse falls on New Year’s Eve 2028. Its next total solar eclipse arrives in 2034, close to sunset, and only the far north gets it.
Eclipses are among the few astronomical events you can put in a calendar decades ahead. We calculated every solar and lunar eclipse from now until the end of 2035 for eleven Indian cities, and checked the type and date of those listed here against NASA’s eclipse catalogs. Some of the results are worth circling now.
India’s next total lunar eclipse comes on the night of 31 December 2028, with totality starting at 9:45 pm and the Moon high in the sky everywhere in the country. The next ring-of-fire annular eclipse crosses the far south in May 2031. And the next total solar eclipse on Indian soil, on 20 March 2034, reaches Srinagar and Leh for about two minutes shortly before sunset.
Lunar eclipses: the ones anyone can watch
A lunar eclipse happens at the same instant for everyone who can see the Moon, so the times below apply across India. What changes from city to city is how high the Moon stands. These are the partial and total eclipses visible from India. We have left out penumbral eclipses, which include several in 2027, because the dimming is too faint for most people to notice. India’s Ministry of Earth Sciences likewise lists the partial eclipse of July 2028 as the country’s next lunar eclipse.
The total eclipses of June 2029 and October 2033 happen during the Indian day, so they will not be seen from here. Our times can differ from other calculations by a minute or two, because each one models the edge of Earth’s shadow slightly differently.
Solar eclipses: where it matters where you stand
A solar eclipse is local. The percentages below are obscuration, the share of the Sun’s disc that the Moon covers at maximum, and they vary widely across the country. Three eclipses stand out. Others in 2028, 2030 and 2032 are small for most of the country, although Srinagar and Leh get about a quarter of the Sun covered on 1 June 2030. The eclipse of 2 September 2035 is at its deepest before sunrise in most of India, so only its closing stage can be seen there.
2 August 2027: a late-afternoon bite
This eclipse is total along a track far to the west of India. Here it is partial and comes in the late afternoon, deepest in the south. For start and end times in 39 cities and a coverage map, see our full guide to the 2 August 2027 eclipse from India.
21 May 2031: a ring of fire over the far south
This is the eclipse to travel for if you live in south India. The Moon will be too far from Earth to cover the Sun completely, leaving a bright ring around it for several minutes. NASA’s catalog lists southern India on the path of annularity. By our calculation the band runs roughly from 9° to 10.4° north in this part of the country, with the Sun high overhead at the time.
Towns near the edge of the band should check a detailed path map closer to the date, since a few kilometers decide whether you see a ring.
20 March 2034: totality in the far north
NASA’s catalog names India among the countries where this eclipse is total. Our calculation places the track across the far north, and it arrives near the end of the day: the Sun is 16 degrees above the horizon at Srinagar and 13 degrees at Leh. Totality is brief there, close to two minutes, at about 5:22 to 5:24 pm in Srinagar and 5:23 to 5:25 pm in Leh. With the Sun that low in the west, a clear western horizon matters as much as the date.
Three dates to mark
If you only keep three of these, keep the New Year’s Eve eclipse of 2028, which needs no travel and comes at a sociable hour. Keep the May 2031 annular eclipse, if you can reach the Kochi to Rameswaram band. And keep March 2034, the rarest of the three, if you can be in the far north with a clear view west.
Before then, this December’s Geminid meteor shower offers a nearer reason to look up.
Looking safely
A lunar eclipse is safe to watch directly. A solar eclipse is not, and that includes every percentage in the tables above and all of the annular phase. NASA advises using solar viewers that comply with the ISO 12312-2 standard, and warns that ordinary sunglasses, however dark, are not safe.
How we worked this out
We used the open-source Astronomy Engine library (version 2.1.19) to find each eclipse and work out local circumstances for each city center, then compared the type and date of the eclipses listed here against NASA’s decade tables. The track limits are from a grid search at 0.05-degree steps in the south and 0.25-degree steps in the north, and are approximate. They ignore local terrain.
Sources
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