Geminids from Harbin in 2026

Geminids from Harbin: the short answer

The Geminids reaches maximum at 21:41 local time on 14 December 2026 over Harbin, Heilongjiang (45.8°N, 126.65°E, 140 m). The radiant culminates 76.5° high at 01:36 and the useful window runs 21:00–06:00, with an ideal-sky ceiling of 145.4 meteors an hour.

That makes the Geminids the strongest of the twelve annual showers from Harbin in 2026, ahead of the Perseids at 84.5 an hour.

The radiant track over this city

The radiant rises at 16:54 bearing NE, culminates 76.5° up at 01:36 towards south (180°), and sets at 10:17. It lies inside Gemini. The rate scales with the sine of that altitude, so 76.5° buys you 97% of a zenith radiant.

When it gets dark here

Sunset over Harbin is 15:49, civil twilight ends 16:23, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 17:37. It holds until 05:18, with sunrise at 07:07: 11 h 41 min of real darkness inside 15 h 18 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 23:28 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Shanghai runs 27 minutes behind mean solar time at 126.65°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 10 of the 14 sampled dark hours. Moonrise 10:49. Moonset 20:37. At the best hour it is 50.8° below the horizon, and the limiting magnitude works out at 6.50.

Why 145 an hour and not 150

Zenithal hourly rate 150, population index 2.6, entry speed 33.8 km/s — medium-speed. Those are stream constants. What changes from city to city is the geometry: at 75.7° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 6.50, Harbin converts that ZHR into about 145.4 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.1 at 17:00 (radiant 0.6°) to 2.8 at 06:00 (radiant 38.6°), peaking at 145.4. That spread across 14 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 Harbin rather than the only one.

Watching from around Harbin

Harbin, Heilongjiang is the 54th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 5.24 million at 140 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Daqing (157 km NW), Jilin (212 km S), Changchun (233 km SSW) — 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.