Geminids from New York City in 2026

Geminids from New York City: the short answer

Maximum for the Geminids in 2026 is 08:41 New York City time on 14 December 2026. From 40.7°N the radiant gets to 81.6° at 01:59, the Moon is 22% lit, and the ideal-sky ceiling is 148.4 meteors an hour.

That makes the Geminids the strongest of the twelve annual showers from New York City in 2026, ahead of the Perseids at 85.7 an hour.

The radiant track over this city

The radiant rises at 17:46 bearing NE, culminates 81.6° up at 01:59 towards south (180°), and sets at 10:10. It lies inside Gemini. The rate scales with the sine of that altitude, so 81.6° buys you 99% of a zenith radiant.

When it gets dark here

New York City loses the Sun at 16:28 and gets it back at 07:12. True astronomical darkness — the only part that counts for faint meteors — runs 18:07 to 05:33, 11 h 26 min out of 14 h 43 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 23:50 here rather than at 00:00: America/New_York runs 4 minutes behind mean solar time at 74.01°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 22% lit and out of the way for 10 of the 14 sampled dark hours. Moonrise 10:54. Moonset 20:42. At the best hour it is 55.5° below the horizon, and the limiting magnitude works out at 6.50.

Why 148 an hour and not 150

Converting ZHR 150 into something useful for New York City means multiplying by sin(81.6°) and dividing by 2.6 raised to (6.5 − 6.50). That lands at 148.4 meteors an hour, from medium-speed 33.8 km/s entries.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 17:00 (radiant -5.8°) to 8.5 at 06:00 (radiant 41.8°), peaking at 148.4. That spread across 14 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 New York City rather than the only one.

Watching from around New York City

New York City is the 29th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 8.80 million at 10 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Philadelphia (130 km SW), Montréal (534 km N), Toronto (555 km NW) — 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.