Geminids from Johannesburg in 2026

Geminids from Johannesburg: the short answer

For Johannesburg, Gauteng, Geminids maximum lands at 15:41 on 14 December 2026. Culmination 02:11 at 31.6° — that is 52% of what the same stream would deliver with the radiant overhead — and the ceiling on the rate is 78.5 meteors an hour.

That makes the Geminids the strongest of the twelve annual showers from Johannesburg in 2026, ahead of the Orionids at 14.8 an hour.

The radiant track over this city

Gemini carries the radiant. From Johannesburg it clears the horizon at 21:23 on a bearing of 54° (NE), reaches 31.6° at 02:11 in the north, and drops back below the horizon at 06:59. Within the observing window it peaks at 31.6°.

When it gets dark here

Johannesburg loses the Sun at 18:55 and gets it back at 05:10. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 20:26 to 03:39, 7 h 13 min out of 10 h 15 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:02 here rather than at 00:00: Africa/Johannesburg runs 8 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 28.04°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 6 of the 9 sampled dark hours. Moonrise 10:27. Moonset 22:50. At the best hour it is 37.7° below the horizon, and the limiting magnitude works out at 6.50.

Why 79 an hour and not 150

Converting ZHR 150 into something useful for Johannesburg means multiplying by sin(31.6°) and dividing by 2.6 raised to (6.5 − 6.50). That lands at 78.5 meteors an hour, from medium-speed 33.8 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 20:00 (radiant -15.8°) to 9.6 at 04:00 (radiant 26.1°), peaking at 78.5. That spread across 9 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 Johannesburg rather than the only one.

Watching from around Johannesburg

Johannesburg, Gauteng is the 25th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 9.42 million at 1767 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Pretoria (53 km NNE), Durban (501 km SE), Harare (981 km NNE) — 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.