Geminids from Hong Kong in 2026

Geminids from Hong Kong: the short answer

Maximum for the Geminids in 2026 is 21:41 Hong Kong time on 14 December 2026. From 22.3°N the radiant gets to 80.1° at 02:26, the Moon is 26% lit, and the ideal-sky ceiling is 147.0 meteors an hour.

That makes the Geminids the strongest of the twelve annual showers from Hong Kong in 2026, ahead of the Perseids at 73.6 an hour.

The radiant track over this city

Gemini carries the radiant. From Hong Kong it clears the horizon at 19:26 on a bearing of 55° (NE), reaches 80.1° at 02:26 in the north, and drops back below the horizon at 09:26. Within the observing window it peaks at 78.4°.

When it gets dark here

Sunset over Hong Kong is 17:41, civil twilight ends 18:05, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 19:01. It holds until 05:34, with sunrise at 06:54: 10 h 34 min of real darkness inside 13 h 13 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:17 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Hong_Kong runs 23 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 114.17°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 11:11. Moonset 22:06. At the best hour it is 52.1° below the horizon, and the limiting magnitude works out at 6.50.

Why 147 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 78.4° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 6.50, Hong Kong converts that ZHR into about 147.0 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 19:00 (radiant -4.9°) to 5.9 at 06:00 (radiant 42.0°), peaking at 147.0. 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 Hong Kong rather than the only one.

Watching from around Hong Kong

Hong Kong is the 37th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 7.40 million at 60 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Shenzhen (32 km NNW), Zhongshan (86 km WNW), Dongguan (93 km NNW) — 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.