Geminids from Bogotá in 2026

Geminids from Bogotá: the short answer

Bogotá is at 4.6°N and 2582 m, which puts the Geminids radiant 62.3° up at culmination (01:59 local time) on the night of maximum, 14 December 2026. Peak activity is 08:41, the rate on this city's own measured sky tops out at 12.2 an hour, and 23:00–05:00 is the stretch to be outside.

That makes the Geminids the strongest of the twelve annual showers from Bogotá in 2026, ahead of the Perseids at 7.6 an hour.

The radiant track over this city

Gemini carries the radiant. From Bogotá it clears the horizon at 19:47 on a bearing of 58° (ENE), reaches 62.3° at 01:59 in the north, and drops back below the horizon at 08:11. Within the observing window it peaks at 62.3°.

When it gets dark here

Bogotá loses the Sun at 17:45 and gets it back at 05:55. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 19:01 to 04:40, 9 h 39 min out of 12 h 10 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 23:50 here rather than at 00:00: America/Bogota runs 4 minutes behind mean solar time at 74.08°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 22% lit and out of the way for 8 of the 11 sampled dark hours. Moonrise 10:10. Moonset 21:37. At the best hour it is 61.1° below the horizon, and the limiting magnitude works out at 4.00.

Why 12 an hour and not 150

Converting ZHR 150 into something useful for Bogotá means multiplying by sin(62.3°) and dividing by 2.6 raised to (6.5 − 4.00). That lands at 12.2 meteors an hour, from medium-speed 33.8 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 19:00 (radiant -10.0°) to 2.1 at 05:00 (radiant 39.6°), peaking at 12.2. 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 Bogotá rather than the only one.

Watching from around Bogotá

Bogotá is the 35th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 7.67 million at 2582 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Medellín (245 km NW), Cali (301 km WSW), Maracaibo (724 km NNE) — 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.