Geminids from Melbourne in 2026

Geminids from Melbourne: the short answer

From Melbourne, Victoria (37.8°S, 25 m) the Geminids maximum of 00:41 on 15 December 2026 is not worth a broken night. The radiant culminates at 20.0° at 03:23, and against Melbourne's own measured sky that converts to 4.6 meteors an hour at best.

That makes the Geminids the strongest of the twelve annual showers from Melbourne in 2026, ahead of the Orionids at 1.0 an hour.

The radiant track over this city

At 37.8°S a declination-+32.3° radiant traces an arc from 23:20 to 07:26, topping out at 20.0° at 03:23 bearing 360°. Inside the dark window it only manages 19.7°, and that lower figure is the one the rates are built from. The radiant currently lies in Gemini.

When it gets dark here

Sunset over Melbourne is 20:37, civil twilight ends 21:08, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 22:32. It holds until 03:57, with sunrise at 05:52: 5 h 25 min of real darkness inside 9 h 15 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 01:14 here rather than at 00:00: Australia/Melbourne runs 80 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 144.96°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 25% lit and out of the way for 5 of the 8 sampled dark hours. Moonrise 11:07. Moonset 00:10. At the best hour it is 28.5° below the horizon, and the limiting magnitude works out at 4.00.

Why 5 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 19.7° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 4.00, Melbourne converts that ZHR into about 4.6 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 22:00 (radiant -12.8°) to 0.2 at 05:00 (radiant 16.4°), peaking at 4.6. That spread across 8 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 15 December 2026 is the best night from Melbourne rather than the only one.

Watching from around Melbourne

Melbourne, Victoria is the 50th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 5.44 million at 25 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Adelaide (654 km WNW), Sydney (713 km NE), Brisbane (1375 km NE) — 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.