Americans will get a front-row seat at a dazzling sky show two years from now when the next total solar eclipse passes directly over the middle of the country, an event that has prompted many observers to start calling it "the Great American Eclipse."

Set to take place on Aug. 21, 2017, the eclipse will pass directly over a huge swath of the country stretching from Oregon to South Carolina, and will reach its peak –which astronmers call its points of greatest duration and greatest eclipse –when it passes over the southeastern corner of Missouri and part of western Kentucky.

This eclipse is set to be the nation’s first total solar eclipse in the continental U.S. in 38 years, after the most recent one, on Feb. 26, 1979, passed over just five states and was obscured by cloudy weather. Before that, to find an eclipse many people in America might have seen, you have to go , Astronomy.com notes.

(ThinkStock)

This will also be the first time that an eclipse’s shadow track –which astronomers call the "" –will pass only over the U.S. and no other country, which is how it has come to be named the "."

Though many people think otherwise, total solar eclipses aren’t rare. The world should see 68 of them during this century, , which works out to about one every 17.6 months, according to Space.com.

Solar eclipses take place when the moon passes between the sun and Earth, creating the shadow known as the umbra on our planet’s surface. While the track taken by the umbra can stretch for thousands of miles, it’s also narrow –it will usually get no bigger than about 167 miles wide.

"For this reason, it has been calculated that, on average, a total eclipse of the sun is visible from the same spot on Earth ," Space.com notes.

NASA has created a of the eclipse’s projected track through the U.S. using Google Earth, which delineates the northern and southern path limits of the track as well as the central path, where NASA says you’ll need to be to see the total phase of the eclipse.

If you’re within the track –which the website Great American Eclipse points out –it will be "unlike anything you’ve seen in your life," the site says. "You will see an eerie quality of sunlight as totality approaches, followed by the astonishing sight of day turning to night and the Sun’s corona blazing in the sky."

You can see maps of the track and more info below.

More Resources on the Eclipse:

MORE FROM WEATHER.COM: Total Lunar Eclipse, April 2015

Lunar eclipse lights up New Zealand sky. (Getty)