Geminids from Dar es Salaam in 2026

Geminids from Dar es Salaam: the short answer

For Dar es Salaam, Geminids maximum lands at 16:41 on 14 December 2026. Culmination 02:26 at 51.0° — that is 78% of what the same stream would deliver with the radiant overhead — and the ceiling on the rate is 27.6 meteors an hour.

That makes the Geminids the strongest of the twelve annual showers from Dar es Salaam in 2026, ahead of the Perseids at 12.3 an hour.

The radiant track over this city

The radiant rises at 20:43 bearing ENE, culminates 51.0° up at 02:26 towards north (360°), and sets at 08:09. It lies inside Gemini. The rate scales with the sine of that altitude, so 51.0° buys you 78% of a zenith radiant.

When it gets dark here

Dar es Salaam loses the Sun at 18:33 and gets it back at 06:02. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 19:49 to 04:45, 8 h 57 min out of 11 h 29 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:17 here rather than at 00:00: Africa/Dar_es_Salaam runs 23 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 39.27°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 7 of the 11 sampled dark hours. Moonrise 10:56. Moonset 22:45. At the best hour it is 45.4° below the horizon, and the limiting magnitude works out at 5.00.

Why 28 an hour and not 150

Converting ZHR 150 into something useful for Dar es Salaam means multiplying by sin(50.5°) and dividing by 2.6 raised to (6.5 − 5.00). That lands at 27.6 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 -21.8°) to 6.2 at 05:00 (radiant 36.5°), peaking at 27.6. 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 Dar es Salaam rather than the only one.

Watching from around Dar es Salaam

Dar es Salaam is the 51st largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 5.38 million at 24 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Nairobi (673 km NNW), Kakamega (936 km NNW), Kampala (1087 km NW) — 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.