Geminids from Abidjan in 2026

Geminids from Abidjan: the short answer

Maximum for the Geminids in 2026 is 13:41 Abidjan time on 14 December 2026. From 5.4°N the radiant gets to 63.2° at 02:19, the Moon is 29% lit, and this city's measured-sky ceiling is 19.7 meteors an hour.

That makes the Geminids the strongest of the twelve annual showers from Abidjan in 2026, ahead of the Perseids at 12.1 an hour.

The radiant track over this city

At 5.4°N a declination-+32.3° radiant traces an arc from 20:05 to 08:33, topping out at 63.2° at 02:19 bearing 360°. Inside the dark window it only manages 62.8°, and that lower figure is the one the rates are built from. The radiant currently lies in Gemini.

When it gets dark here

Sunset over Abidjan is 18:05, civil twilight ends 18:27, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 19:20. It holds until 05:01, with sunrise at 06:16: 9 h 42 min of real darkness inside 12 h 11 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:10 here rather than at 00:00: Africa/Abidjan runs 16 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 4.00°W. That offset is why the best hour on this page is not the hour you would guess from the clock.

What the Moon does here

The Moon is 29% lit and out of the way for 7 of the 11 sampled dark hours. Moonrise 11:02. Moonset 22:32. At the best hour it is 49.7° below the horizon, and the limiting magnitude works out at 4.50.

Why 20 an hour and not 150

Zenithal hourly rate 150, population index 2.6, entry speed 33.8 km/s — medium-speed. Those are stream constants. What changes from city to city is the geometry: at 62.8° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 4.50, Abidjan converts that ZHR into about 19.7 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 19:00 (radiant -13.7°) to 15.4 at 05:00 (radiant 44.0°), peaking at 19.7. That spread across 11 hours is why a "what time" answer beats a "how many" answer.

The stream comes from Minor planet (3200) Phaethon and is listed as active 4 December to 20 December, so 14 December 2026 is the best night from Abidjan rather than the only one.

Watching from around Abidjan

Abidjan is the 47th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 6.32 million at 50 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Kumasi (302 km ENE), Accra (422 km E), Lomé (584 km E) — close enough that the radiant altitudes barely change, far enough that sunset and moonrise do.

What this page does not know

Rates on this page are computed against this city's own measured sky brightness, derived from satellite night-lights data. That is a calculated brightness for the point directly overhead, not a survey of your street: a park on the edge of town and a lit car park in the centre share the same figure here and will not look the same. It is also zenith-only, while the Bortle scale describes the whole sky from horizon to horizon.

Cloud cover is a forecast, not a constant, so it is resolved when you load the tonight card and is deliberately absent from this prerendered page — the hourly table shows "unavailable" rather than assuming clear skies. Meteor outbursts, local terrain and building horizons are not modelled.

A single observer with an unobstructed horizon typically records 30–50% below the ideal-sky figure. Give your eyes twenty minutes to adapt, keep bright screens away, look about halfway up the sky rather than straight at the radiant, and count for a full hour before judging a shower.