Mecca, 2 August 2027

The Moon covers the Sun completely over Mecca for 5 minutes and 8 seconds, in the early afternoon, with the Sun almost straight overhead. Below are the exact times, the trade-off nobody selling you a trip will mention, and what is still unmeasured.

Exactly when

Saudi Arabia does not change its clocks, so those are the times you will read on your phone. Across the whole city the duration varies by less than eight seconds, which means where you stand inside Mecca does not matter — a rare thing on an eclipse trip, and it removes the one decision that usually causes trouble on the morning.

The trade-off, stated plainly

Mecca is not the best place in Saudi Arabia to see this eclipse, and any page that lets you assume otherwise is selling you something. The axis of the shadow — where totality lasts longest — passes 97 km south of the city. Standing on it there would give you6m12s, a minute and four seconds more. Jeddah, on the coast, gets5m56s: forty-eight seconds more than Mecca.

If your reason for being in Mecca is Mecca, that table changes nothing and the sixty-four seconds are not the point. But you should have the number rather than discover it afterwards. And if what you want is the longest possible totality, this page is honest enough to tell you it is elsewhere.

Medina sees no totality

This one matters, because the two cities are so often visited together. Medina iswell outside the band — not marginally, not "almost": it is more than twice the band's half-width away from the axis. From Medina the Sun will be deeply bitten into and the afternoon will dim, and there will be no corona, no darkness, and nothing of what people travel for. A partial eclipse and a total eclipse are not two degrees of the same experience.

The last time, and the next

This is the part the web gets wrong, so here it is computed rather than repeated. Mecca's last totality was 30 August 1905: 1m42s, with the Sun only 15 degrees above the horizon. That makes 2 August 2027 the first in 122 years.

The date usually offered instead is 1952, and the Arabic press has turned it into75 years. A total eclipse did cross Saudi territory on 25 February 1952 — but its axis passed 202 kilometres north of Mecca. The city saw a partial eclipse of magnitude 0.98: ninety-eight per cent of the Sun's diameter covered, and no totality. It came close, and close is a different event. That is the same distinction this page makes about Medina in 2027, and it is the reason 1952 is not Mecca's answer.

After 2027 the next one is 5 February 2334. It is total over Mecca — the city sits just inside the southern edge of the path — and it lasts 29 seconds. Twenty-nine seconds against five minutes and eight: the same word for two different events. Being that close to the edge is also what makes the 29 itself the soft number here. The calculation depends on ΔT, the drift between the Earth's rotation and clock time, which three centuries out is an extrapolation rather than a measurement, and near the edge a small error in it moves the seconds a great deal. The date and the totality hold; treat the duration as an order of magnitude.

Which is the real point. Not "the first in 77 years", not 1221, and not something in Dhu al-Hijjah — all four of those are in circulation and all four are wrong.2 August 2027 is the only unambiguous totality over Mecca between 1905 and at least 2334, and the one after it is a 29-second graze.

How this was worked out: the local circumstances for 1905, 1952 and 2334 are computed from NASA GSFC Besselian elements by the same reduction used for the 2027 figures on this page, and the code re-derives NASA's own published central line for 1905 and 1952 before it will print anything — agreeing to 0.1 s on duration. One claim here is not ours: that no eclipse between 2027 and 2334 is total over Mecca. Checking that would mean computing every solar eclipse for three centuries, which we have not done; that span comes from the NASA canon and is the only figure in this section we did not calculate.

The date is the part that makes this feasible

2 August 2027 falls on 29 Safar 1449 — the last day of the month, with Rabi' al-Awwal starting the next morning. Safar is the second month of the year and the Hajj is in the twelfth, which drops this eclipse into the widest gap the calendar has to offer: the Hajj of 1448 was in mid-May 2027, two and a half months earlier, and the Hajj of 1449 is not until early May 2028. So this is not a trip that has to compete with the Hajj for a bed, a permit or a road, which is the single biggest reason a date near Dhu al-Hijjah would have made the whole idea impractical.

That date is computed from the Umm al-Qura table — the calendar Saudi Arabia actually runs on — with two known dates asserted before the result is used. Converters built on the tabularIslamic calendar return 28 Safar instead, one day earlier; that is the approximation, not the calendar in official use. A moon sighting can still move a month boundary by a day, so confirm the exact day against the official calendar if your plans hang on it. The month is not in doubt.

The eclipse prayer

There is a long-established prayer performed during a solar eclipse, and its timing is simply the eclipse itself — which is the one thing this page can help with. Totality at Mecca runs from 13:23:56 to 13:29:03, and the partial phases run for well over an hour on either side of it.

It is held at the Haram, and it is announced. The most recent precedent we could read is the lunar eclipse of 7 September 2025, when the Presidency of Religious Affairs announce[d] the observance of Salat Al Khusuf in accordance with the Prophetic traditionat both the Grand Mosque (Masjid al Haram) in Makkah and the Prophet's Mosque (Masjid an Nabawi) in Madinah, at 9:00 PM in Mecca. Nothing has been announced for 2 August 2027 — it is a year away — but the pattern is that the announcement comes from the Presidency, shortly before, and names the time.

Beyond the times, this site has nothing to say: we measure prices and geometry, not worship. Follow your own religious authorities on everything else.

On demand: we have no measured prices for Mecca yet, so we will not tell you whether August 2027 is cheap or expensive. What the calendar does say is that the eclipse sits outside both periods that concentrate demand — the Hajj, mid-May 2027 and early May 2028, and Ramadan 1449, which begins 28 January 2028. That is a computed statement about the calendar, not a claim about prices.

Entry, and why the date helps twice

The Saudi Ministry of Hajj and Umrah states that Umrah can be performed by any time of year. The one official closure is bounded explicitly: the dedicated Umrah visawill not be activated during the Hajj season, from the first of Dhu Al-Qi'dah to the 13th of Dhu Al-Hijjah. The eclipse falls in Safar, and that window is nowhere near it: the 1448 one closed on 19 May 2027, two and a half months before, and the 1449 one does not open until 27 March 2028. The date that made this trip affordable also puts it about as far from the one restricted period as the calendar allows.

On permits, the Saudi Press Agency lists the visas that allow Umrah aspersonal and family visit visas, electronic tourist visas, transit visas, work visas, and other types of visas, and the ministry's own guide states thattourist visa holders can perform Umrah and visit Madinah. You are also not obliged to go through an operator: the same guide says whether you are coming to the Kingdom for Umrah on your own or through an agent, you can easily book your hotel stay remotely. A separate multiple-entry Umrah visa announced in July 2026 does require a package bought from a licensed provider on the Nusuk platform, so the two routes are not interchangeable.

Mecca is closed to non-Muslims. We could not find that stated on any Saudi government page we opened, so the attribution here is to the US State Department, which writes that non-Muslims are not allowed to travel to Mecca or enter the Prophet's Mosque. It is a well-established restriction; we would rather tell you which source we have than imply a Saudi one we did not read.

All of the above was checked on 17 August 2026, and the Umrah visa rules changed less than a month before that. Verify against the official sources before you book anything: the 1449 AH Umrah season calendar had not been published when we looked.

From the airport

Jeddah is the gateway. The ministry's guide gives the distance asabout 86 kilometers from Makkah Al-Mukarramah.

The high-speed rail journey time and fare are not published here. The Saudi railway's own site was unreachable when we checked, and the figures circulating elsewhere disagree badly — between 30 and 75 minutes, and between SAR 60 and SAR 280 depending on who you ask. Numbers that contradict each other by a factor of four are not numbers, so this section stays empty until we can read them at the source.

What it costs

Not measured yet. Mecca is not in our price pipeline; the moment it is, the figures land here with their platform and their observation date, like every other number on this site.

The heat, however, can be said now. In August the average daily high around Mecca runs near41 °C and the average low near 28 °C — figures from a climatology built on NASA MERRA-2 reanalysis over 1980–2016, not from the Saudi meteorological authority, whose site publishes only current forecasts. Totality is at 13:26 with the Sun 75° up, which is to say the hottest part of the day. That is a safety factor rather than a detail, and it is the one thing about this trip that nobody can book their way around.

See how we measure for what we will and will not publish before we have checked it.

Where else the shadow goes

The band crosses nine countries. If Mecca turns out not to suit your dates or your budget, thecost scale ranks five ways to reach totality by what they cost and what can go wrong on the day, and the Marsa Alam route is the cheapest measured way to sleep inside the path.