Geminids from Baghdad in 2026

Geminids from Baghdad: the short answer

Baghdad is at 33.3°N and 41 m, which puts the Geminids radiant 88.8° up at culmination (02:05 local time) on the night of maximum, 14 December 2026. Peak activity is 16:41, the reference-sky rate tops out at 149.9 an hour, and 22:00–06:00 is the stretch to be outside.

That makes the Geminids the strongest of the twelve annual showers from Baghdad in 2026, ahead of the Perseids at 79.4 an hour.

The radiant track over this city

Gemini carries the radiant. From Baghdad it clears the horizon at 18:27 on a bearing of 50° (NE), reaches 88.8° at 02:05 in the south, and drops back below the horizon at 09:43. Within the observing window it peaks at 88.3°.

When it gets dark here

The dark hours here run 18:24 to 05:29 — 11 h 5 min of astronomical night, bracketed by sunset at 16:55 and sunrise at 06:58. Civil twilight ends at 17:23; anything earlier than that is wasted effort.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 23:57 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Baghdad runs 2 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 44.40°E. 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 28% lit and out of the way for 9 of the 13 sampled dark hours. Moonrise 11:07. Moonset 21:42. At the best hour it is 51.3° below the horizon, and the limiting magnitude works out at 6.50.

Why 150 an hour and not 150

The published ZHR of 150 assumes the radiant overhead and a sky at limiting magnitude 6.5. Here the radiant reaches 88.3° inside the dark window and the limiting magnitude at the best hour is 6.50, which with r = 2.6 gives 149.9 an hour. Entry speed is 33.8 km/s.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 18:00 (radiant -4.3°) to 4.5 at 06:00 (radiant 41.4°), peaking at 149.9. That spread across 13 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 Baghdad rather than the only one.

Watching from around Baghdad

Baghdad is the 38th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 7.22 million at 41 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Erbil (319 km N), Mosul (353 km NNW), Basrah (448 km SE) — close enough that the radiant altitudes barely change, far enough that sunset and moonrise do.

What this page does not know

Light-pollution data for this location is not connected yet. Rates on this page are computed against the reference rural sky the zenithal hourly rate is defined for (naked-eye limiting magnitude 6.5); they are not a claim about how bright the sky is where you are standing. Once the light-pollution layer is connected these figures will be recomputed for the local sky and will generally fall.

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.