Geminids from Beijing in 2026

Geminids from Beijing: the short answer

Maximum for the Geminids in 2026 is 21:41 Beijing time on 14 December 2026. From 39.9°N the radiant gets to 82.3° at 02:17, the Moon is 26% lit, and this city's measured-sky ceiling is 13.6 meteors an hour.

That makes the Geminids the strongest of the twelve annual showers from Beijing in 2026, ahead of the Perseids at 11.6 an hour.

The radiant track over this city

At 39.9°N a declination-+32.3° radiant traces an arc from 18:10 to 10:24, topping out at 82.3° at 02:17 bearing 180°. Inside the dark window it only manages 81.5°, and that lower figure is the one the rates are built from. The radiant currently lies in Gemini.

When it gets dark here

Beijing loses the Sun at 16:49 and gets it back at 07:28. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 18:27 to 05:51, 11 h 24 min out of 14 h 39 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:09 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Shanghai runs 14 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 116.40°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 26% lit and out of the way for 9 of the 13 sampled dark hours. Moonrise 11:22. Moonset 21:31. At the best hour it is 48.4° below the horizon, and the limiting magnitude works out at 4.00.

Why 14 an hour and not 150

Converting ZHR 150 into something useful for Beijing means multiplying by sin(81.5°) and dividing by 2.6 raised to (6.5 − 4.00). That lands at 13.6 meteors an hour, from medium-speed 33.8 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 18:00 (radiant -1.4°) to 5.8 at 06:00 (radiant 45.2°), peaking at 13.6. 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 Beijing rather than the only one.

Watching from around Beijing

Beijing is the 2nd largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 18.96 million at 49 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Tianjin (108 km SE), Baoding (140 km SW), Tangshan (155 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.