Geminids from Chengdu in 2026

Geminids from Chengdu: the short answer

For Chengdu, Sichuan, Geminids maximum lands at 21:41 on 14 December 2026. Culmination 03:07 at 88.5° — that is 100% of what the same stream would deliver with the radiant overhead — and the ceiling on the rate is 22.2 meteors an hour.

That makes the Geminids the strongest of the twelve annual showers from Chengdu in 2026, ahead of the Perseids at 17.3 an hour.

The radiant track over this city

The radiant rises at 19:39 bearing NE, culminates 88.5° up at 03:07 towards north (360°), and sets at 10:34. It lies inside Gemini. The rate scales with the sine of that altitude, so 88.5° buys you 100% of a zenith radiant.

When it gets dark here

Chengdu loses the Sun at 18:03 and gets it back at 07:53. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 19:29 to 06:27, 10 h 58 min out of 13 h 50 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:58 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Shanghai runs 64 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 104.07°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. Moonset 22:37. At the best hour it is 53.8° below the horizon, and the limiting magnitude works out at 4.50.

Why 22 an hour and not 150

Converting ZHR 150 into something useful for Chengdu means multiplying by sin(87.8°) and dividing by 2.6 raised to (6.5 − 4.50). That lands at 22.2 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 -6.3°) to 1.3 at 07:00 (radiant 40.9°), peaking at 22.2. 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 Chengdu rather than the only one.

Watching from around Chengdu

Chengdu, Sichuan is the 9th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 13.57 million at 499 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Mianyang (107 km NNE), Nanchong (193 km E), Chongqing (269 km ESE) — 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.