Geminids from Delhi in 2026

Geminids from Delhi: the short answer

Delhi is at 28.7°N and 227 m, which puts the Geminids radiant 86.5° up at culmination (02:24 local time) on the night of maximum, 14 December 2026. Peak activity is 19:11, the rate on this city's own measured sky tops out at 13.7 an hour, and 23:00–06:00 is the stretch to be outside.

That makes the Geminids the strongest of the twelve annual showers from Delhi in 2026, ahead of the Perseids at 11.2 an hour.

The radiant track over this city

At 28.7°N a declination-+32.3° radiant traces an arc from 19:03 to 09:44, topping out at 86.5° at 02:24 bearing 360°. Inside the dark window it only manages 83.6°, and that lower figure is the one the rates are built from. The radiant currently lies in Gemini.

When it gets dark here

The dark hours here run 18:49 to 05:41 — 10 h 52 min of astronomical night, bracketed by sunset at 17:25 and sunrise at 07:06. Civil twilight ends at 17:51; anything earlier than that is wasted effort.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:15 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Kolkata runs 21 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 77.23°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 27% lit and out of the way for 9 of the 13 sampled dark hours. Moonrise 11:18. Moonset 22:02. At the best hour it is 50.2° below the horizon, and the limiting magnitude works out at 4.00.

Why 14 an hour and not 150

The published ZHR of 150 assumes the radiant overhead and a sky at limiting magnitude 6.5. Here the radiant reaches 83.6° inside the dark window and the limiting magnitude at the best hour is 4.00, which with r = 2.6 gives 13.7 an hour. Entry speed is 33.8 km/s.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 18:00 (radiant -10.4°) to 2.9 at 06:00 (radiant 43.9°), peaking at 13.7. 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 Delhi rather than the only one.

Watching from around Delhi

Delhi is the 16th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 11.03 million at 227 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Jaipur (239 km SW), Ludhiana (284 km NNW), Kanpur (392 km SE) — 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.