Geminids from Santiago in 2026

Geminids from Santiago: the short answer

Santiago is at 33.5°S and 556 m, which puts the Geminids radiant 24.3° up at culmination (03:45 local time) on the night of maximum, 14 December 2026. Peak activity is 10:41, the rate on this city's own measured sky tops out at 5.6 an hour, and 02:00–05:00 is the stretch to be outside.

That makes the Geminids the strongest of the twelve annual showers from Santiago in 2026, ahead of the Orionids at 1.3 an hour.

The radiant track over this city

Gemini carries the radiant. From Santiago it clears the horizon at 23:24 on a bearing of 50° (NE), reaches 24.3° at 03:45 in the north, and drops back below the horizon at 08:07. Within the observing window it peaks at 24.2°.

When it gets dark here

The dark hours here run 22:30 to 04:43 — 6 h 13 min of astronomical night, bracketed by sunset at 20:47 and sunrise at 06:26. Civil twilight ends at 21:16; anything earlier than that is wasted effort.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 01:36 here rather than at 00:00: America/Santiago runs 103 minutes ahead of mean solar time at 70.65°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 5 of the 8 sampled dark hours. Moonrise 11:13. Moonset 00:14. At the best hour it is 36.7° below the horizon, and the limiting magnitude works out at 4.00.

Why 6 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 24.2° inside the dark window and the limiting magnitude at the best hour is 4.00, which with r = 2.6 gives 5.6 an hour. Entry speed is 33.8 km/s.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 22:00 (radiant -14.5°) to 2.4 at 05:00 (radiant 22.0°), peaking at 5.6. 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 14 December 2026 is the best night from Santiago rather than the only one.

Watching from around Santiago

Santiago is the 59th largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 4.84 million at 556 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Córdoba (648 km ENE), Buenos Aires (1137 km E), Asunción (1551 km ENE) — 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.