Geminids from London in 2026

Geminids from London: the short answer

London, England is at 51.5°N and 25 m, which puts the Geminids radiant 70.6° up at culmination (02:03 local time) on the night of maximum, 14 December 2026. Peak activity is 13:41, the rate on this city's own measured sky tops out at 13.0 an hour, and 22:00–06:00 is the stretch to be outside.

That makes the Geminids the strongest of the twelve annual showers from London in 2026, ahead of the Perseids at 11.8 an hour.

The radiant track over this city

Gemini carries the radiant. From London it clears the horizon at 16:34 on a bearing of 31° (NNE), reaches 70.6° at 02:03 in the south, and drops back below the horizon at 11:32. Within the observing window it peaks at 70.6°.

When it gets dark here

Sunset over London is 15:51, civil twilight ends 16:31, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 17:55. It holds until 05:55, with sunrise at 07:59: 12 hours of real darkness inside 16 h 8 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 23:55 here rather than at 00:00: Europe/London runs 1 minute ahead of mean solar time at 0.13°W. 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 29% lit and out of the way for 10 of the 15 sampled dark hours. Moonrise 11:32. Moonset 21:15. At the best hour it is 40.6° below the horizon, and the limiting magnitude works out at 4.00.

Why 13 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 70.6° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 4.00, London converts that ZHR into about 13.0 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 17:00 (radiant 2.2°) to 0.4 at 07:00 (radiant 34.2°), peaking at 13.0. That spread across 15 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 London rather than the only one.

Watching from around London

London, England is the 28th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 8.96 million at 25 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Paris (344 km SSE), Hamburg (720 km ENE), Munich (918 km ESE) — 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.