Geminids from Ho Chi Minh City in 2026

Geminids from Ho Chi Minh City: the short answer

For Ho Chi Minh City, Geminids maximum lands at 20:41 on 14 December 2026. Culmination 01:56 at 68.6° — that is 93% of what the same stream would deliver with the radiant overhead — and the ceiling on the rate is 20.7 meteors an hour.

That makes the Geminids the strongest of the twelve annual showers from Ho Chi Minh City in 2026, ahead of the Perseids at 13.0 an hour.

The radiant track over this city

The radiant rises at 19:29 bearing ENE, culminates 68.6° up at 01:56 towards north (360°), and sets at 08:24. It lies inside Gemini. The rate scales with the sine of that altitude, so 68.6° buys you 93% of a zenith radiant.

When it gets dark here

Ho Chi Minh City loses the Sun at 17:32 and gets it back at 06:03. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 18:48 to 04:47, 10 hours out of 12 h 30 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 23:48 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Ho_Chi_Minh runs 7 minutes behind mean solar time at 106.63°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 8 of the 12 sampled dark hours. Moonrise 10:32. Moonset 21:50. At the best hour it is 58.8° below the horizon, and the limiting magnitude works out at 4.50.

Why 21 an hour and not 150

Converting ZHR 150 into something useful for Ho Chi Minh City means multiplying by sin(68.6°) and dividing by 2.6 raised to (6.5 − 4.50). That lands at 20.7 meteors an hour, from medium-speed 33.8 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 18:00 (radiant -17.7°) to 5.6 at 05:00 (radiant 42.8°), peaking at 20.7. That spread across 12 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 Ho Chi Minh City rather than the only one.

Watching from around Ho Chi Minh City

Ho Chi Minh City is the 8th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 14.00 million at 7 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Cần Thơ (127 km SW), Phnom Penh (204 km WNW), Bangkok (741 km WNW) — 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.