Geminids from Cape Town in 2026

Geminids from Cape Town: the short answer

Maximum for the Geminids in 2026 is 15:41 Cape Town time on 14 December 2026. From 33.9°S the radiant gets to 23.9° at 02:49, the Moon is 28% lit, and this city's measured-sky ceiling is 9.0 meteors an hour.

That makes the Geminids the strongest of the twelve annual showers from Cape Town in 2026, ahead of the Orionids at 2.0 an hour.

The radiant track over this city

Gemini carries the radiant. From Cape Town it clears the horizon at 22:29 on a bearing of 50° (NE), reaches 23.9° at 02:49 in the north, and drops back below the horizon at 07:09. Within the observing window it peaks at 23.9°.

When it gets dark here

Cape Town loses the Sun at 19:52 and gets it back at 05:29. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 21:36 to 03:45, 6 h 8 min out of 9 h 37 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:41 here rather than at 00:00: Africa/Johannesburg runs 46 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 18.42°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 6 of the 9 sampled dark hours. Moonrise 10:59. Moonset 23:39. At the best hour it is 35.4° below the horizon, and the limiting magnitude works out at 4.50.

Why 9 an hour and not 150

Converting ZHR 150 into something useful for Cape Town means multiplying by sin(23.9°) and dividing by 2.6 raised to (6.5 − 4.50). That lands at 9.0 meteors an hour, from medium-speed 33.8 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 21:00 (radiant -15.4°) to 0.1 at 05:00 (radiant 17.2°), peaking at 9.0. That spread across 9 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 Cape Town rather than the only one.

Watching from around Cape Town

Cape Town, Western Cape is the 60th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 4.77 million at 25 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Johannesburg (1262 km NE), Durban (1272 km ENE), Pretoria (1308 km NE) — 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.