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Every total solar eclipse for millennia ahead is already dated, located, and catalogued by NASA — each one pinned to the instant the Moon's shadow bites deepest, and to the spot on Earth beneath it. This project treats each of them as a monument-in-waiting.
A sibling archive engine — a headless AI agent, running in a private repo of its own — works a rolling window several eclipses ahead of the sky. For each one it resolves an observing place somewhere on the path of totality, gathers that place's cultural and geographical context, and then waits. At totality it commits a self-contained generative SVG "monument" to its archive and rolls forward to the next eclipse.
This site is the read-only viewer for that archive. It never talks to the engine directly: it reads only what the engine has already published, so the monuments below arrived here without anyone deciding they should.
NASA's Five Millennium Catalog fixes every future total solar eclipse in advance — each one pinned to its instant of greatest eclipse, when the Moon's shadow axis passes closest to Earth's centre, and to the point on the surface directly beneath it. This project treats each catalogued eclipse as a monument-in-waiting.
A sibling archive engine — an autonomous AI agent built on the Eve agent framework and deployed to Vercel, where each of its roles runs as a scheduled cron job — works several eclipses ahead of the sky from a private repository of its own. For each upcoming eclipse it resolves an observing place somewhere along the path of totality.
Twice a year a data-gathering run looks a five-eclipse window ahead and, for any eclipse not yet covered, researches its observing location — its place in the world, the cultural threads that run through it, and a set of titled sources — so the eventual artwork is rooted in where it will be seen, not only in when.
The catalogue's headline instant belongs to the point of greatest eclipse, which is often out at sea and hundreds or thousands of kilometres from the chosen observing site. Totality reaches that site at its own moment in the shadow's track — sometimes tens of minutes to either side. The countdown above targets the catalogued instant; the monument is made when totality actually sweeps the observing place.
A lightweight tick runs every few minutes and does almost nothing — until totality for the target eclipse is minutes away and no monument yet exists. Only then does it wake the generative model, which commits a single self-contained SVG — the monument, unique to that eclipse — and rolls the pointer to the next one. Waking the expensive model only in those final minutes keeps its cost bound to the real eclipse rate, roughly twice a year. The engine is a blind publisher: it has no knowledge of this viewer and never references it. Nothing here is drawn by hand or curated after the fact.
On the first of every month a sentinel run audits the whole system: it verifies the archive's data integrity, dry-runs the generative pipeline to confirm it can still produce a valid monument, pings every external data source the engine depends on, and checks its own dependencies for deprecation. Anything that fails or drifts opens a single tracked issue rather than failing silently.
The viewer is strictly read-only. When the engine publishes a new artefact, a signed notification tells this site, which fetches the file and mirrors it into its own storage. A daily reconciliation pass quietly backfills anything a missed notification left behind.
Every page you see reads only from this site's own mirror — never live from the engine — so nothing you load waits on the upstream. The mirror only ever adds: once a monument arrives it stays, even if it later changes or vanishes upstream. The archive can grow, but it doesn't forget.
Humans have been picturing the eclipsed sun for five thousand years — carving it into Neolithic tombs, painting it into crucifixions, and turning it into a metaphor for war and dread in the twentieth century. A companion essay traces that lineage, the same one each monument quietly joins.
The Art History of Solar Eclipses →12 August 2026
es Castell, Menorca, Balearic Islands, 07720, Spain
Menorca or Minorca is one of the Balearic Islands located in the Mediterranean Sea belonging to Spain. Its name derives from its size, contrasting it with nearby Mallorca (Majorca). Its capital is Mahón, situated on the island's eastern end, although Menorca…
Open the monument →to greatest eclipse
NASA fixes each eclipse at its instant of greatest eclipse — here 10:06:34 UTC, at 25.5°N 33.2°E. The clock above counts to that instant.
A ancient egypt totality over Luxor.