Geminids from Lagos in 2026

Geminids from Lagos: the short answer

For Lagos, Geminids maximum lands at 14:41 on 14 December 2026. Culmination 02:49 at 64.3° — that is 90% of what the same stream would deliver with the radiant overhead — and the ceiling on the rate is 135.0 meteors an hour.

That makes the Geminids the strongest of the twelve annual showers from Lagos in 2026, ahead of the Perseids at 57.9 an hour.

The radiant track over this city

The radiant rises at 20:33 bearing ENE, culminates 64.3° up at 02:49 towards north (360°), and sets at 09:06. It lies inside Gemini. The rate scales with the sine of that altitude, so 64.3° buys you 90% of a zenith radiant.

When it gets dark here

Lagos loses the Sun at 18:33 and gets it back at 06:48. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 19:48 to 05:34, 9 h 45 min out of 12 h 15 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:41 here rather than at 00:00: Africa/Lagos runs 46 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 3.39°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 8 of the 12 sampled dark hours. Moonrise 11:33. Moonset 23:01. At the best hour it is 57.1° below the horizon, and the limiting magnitude works out at 6.50.

Why 135 an hour and not 150

Converting ZHR 150 into something useful for Lagos means multiplying by sin(64.2°) and dividing by 2.6 raised to (6.5 − 6.50). That lands at 135.0 meteors an hour, from medium-speed 33.8 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 19:00 (radiant -19.1°) to 4.3 at 06:00 (radiant 38.9°), peaking at 135.0. 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 Lagos rather than the only one.

Watching from around Lagos

Lagos is the 7th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 15.39 million at 11 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Ibadan (117 km NNE), Lomé (243 km W), Benin City (247 km E) — 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.