Geminids from Dalian in 2026

Geminids from Dalian: the short answer

Maximum for the Geminids in 2026 is 21:41 Dalian time on 14 December 2026. From 38.9°N the radiant gets to 83.3° at 01:56, the Moon is 26% lit, and the ideal-sky ceiling is 149.0 meteors an hour.

That makes the Geminids the strongest of the twelve annual showers from Dalian in 2026, ahead of the Perseids at 84.9 an hour.

The radiant track over this city

At 38.9°N a declination-+32.3° radiant traces an arc from 17:54 to 09:59, topping out at 83.3° at 01:56 bearing 180°. Inside the dark window it only manages 83.3°, and that lower figure is the one the rates are built from. The radiant currently lies in Gemini.

When it gets dark here

Dalian loses the Sun at 16:32 and gets it back at 07:04. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 18:07 to 05:28, 11 h 21 min out of 14 h 33 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 23:48 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Shanghai runs 6 minutes behind mean solar time at 121.60°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 11:00. Moonset 21:12. At the best hour it is 52.3° below the horizon, and the limiting magnitude works out at 6.50.

Why 149 an hour and not 150

Converting ZHR 150 into something useful for Dalian means multiplying by sin(83.3°) and dividing by 2.6 raised to (6.5 − 6.50). That lands at 149.0 meteors an hour, from medium-speed 33.8 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.8 at 18:00 (radiant 0.8°) to 5.0 at 06:00 (radiant 41.0°), peaking at 149.0. 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 Dalian rather than the only one.

Watching from around Dalian

Dalian, Liaoning is the 57th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 4.91 million at 33 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Yantai (160 km S), Anshan (273 km NNE), Tangshan (305 km WNW) — 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.