Electronic – capacitor and resistor combination

Well, you know that to charge a capacitor instantly will require infinite current, right? And we know that all real-world power sources have some finite resistance associated with them, as do capacitors (ESR). However, as your intuition suggests, if you just pop your capacitor across a supply you are depending on the parasitic resistance to limit your current. If it doesn't limit your current enough your supply may not be able to handle it and you can get droop or brownout.

So it's better to control the charging impedance to a known value that doesn't stress the rest of the system.

Sometimes, especially in AC/DC supplies a positive tempco thermistor is used to limit the inrush that charges the main cap. As it heats up the resistance decreases and the circuit begins operation.

As awesome as the 555 is, its drift may be a bit too high for periods this long.

I recommend you look at using a MCU instead, such as the ATtiny4. It comes in SOT23-6 packaging and has an internal RC oscillator which is reasonably accurate.

If you move up to a ATtiny25/45/85 (SOIC-8/DIL-8/QFN-20) then you can program it using the Arduino IDE once you have installed arduino-tiny, plus it can support an external 32.768kHz watch crystal which will improve accuracy by several orders of magnitude.