Geminids from Saint Petersburg in 2026

Geminids from Saint Petersburg: the short answer

Saint Petersburg, St.-Petersburg is at 59.9°N and 11 m, which puts the Geminids radiant 62.2° up at culmination (03:02 local time) on the night of maximum, 14 December 2026. Peak activity is 16:41, the reference-sky rate tops out at 132.7 an hour, and 22:00–08:00 is the stretch to be outside.

That makes the Geminids the strongest of the twelve annual showers from Saint Petersburg in 2026, ahead of the Quadrantids at 52.3 an hour.

The radiant track over this city

The radiant is circumpolar from 59.9°N: it never sets. Over the night it swings between its low point and 62.2° at 03:02, bearing S (180°) at culmination. It sits inside Gemini, and because it is above the horizon for every dark hour, what limits you here is darkness and moonlight, not geometry.

When it gets dark here

Sunset over Saint Petersburg is 15:52, civil twilight ends 16:49, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 18:37. It holds until 07:10, with sunrise at 09:55: 12 h 33 min of real darkness inside 18 h 3 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 00:53 here rather than at 00:00: Europe/Moscow runs 59 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 30.31°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 12:47. Moonset 21:39. At the best hour it is 35.9° below the horizon, and the limiting magnitude works out at 6.50.

Why 133 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 62.2° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 6.50, Saint Petersburg converts that ZHR into about 132.7 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 17:00 (radiant 5.3°) to 4.2 at 08:00 (radiant 35.0°), peaking at 132.7. 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 Saint Petersburg rather than the only one.

Watching from around Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg, St.-Petersburg is the 52nd largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 5.35 million at 11 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Moscow (635 km SE), Stockholm (691 km W), Minsk (692 km SSW) — 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.