Geminids from Moscow in 2026

Geminids from Moscow: the short answer

For Moscow, Geminids maximum lands at 16:41 on 14 December 2026. Culmination 02:32 at 66.4° — that is 92% of what the same stream would deliver with the radiant overhead — and the ceiling on the rate is 137.0 meteors an hour.

That makes the Geminids the strongest of the twelve annual showers from Moscow in 2026, ahead of the Perseids at 75.7 an hour.

The radiant track over this city

Gemini carries the radiant. From Moscow it clears the horizon at 16:01 on a bearing of 19° (NNE), reaches 66.4° at 02:32 in the south, and drops back below the horizon at 13:04. Within the observing window it peaks at 66.0°.

When it gets dark here

The dark hours here run 18:16 to 06:32 — 12 h 16 min of astronomical night, bracketed by sunset at 15:55 and sunrise at 08:53. Civil twilight ends at 16:42; anything earlier than that is wasted effort.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:24 here rather than at 00:00: Europe/Moscow runs 30 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 37.62°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 11 of the 16 sampled dark hours. Moonrise 12:00. Moonset 21:24. At the best hour it is 41.5° below the horizon, and the limiting magnitude works out at 6.50.

Why 137 an hour and not 150

The published ZHR of 150 assumes the radiant overhead and a sky at limiting magnitude 6.5. Here the radiant reaches 66.0° inside the dark window and the limiting magnitude at the best hour is 6.50, which with r = 2.6 gives 137.0 an hour. Entry speed is 33.8 km/s.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.1 at 17:00 (radiant 3.4°) to 0.2 at 08:00 (radiant 30.5°), peaking at 137.0. That spread across 16 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 Moscow rather than the only one.

Watching from around Moscow

Moscow is the 18th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 10.38 million at 155 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Saint Petersburg (635 km NW), Minsk (675 km WSW), Kyiv (755 km SW) — 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.