Geminids from Shanghai in 2026

Geminids from Shanghai: the short answer

The Geminids reaches maximum at 21:41 local time on 14 December 2026 over Shanghai (31.2°N, 121.46°E, 12 m). The radiant culminates 89.0° high at 01:57 and the useful window runs 22:00–06:00, with a ceiling of 13.8 meteors an hour on Shanghai's own measured sky.

That makes the Geminids the strongest of the twelve annual showers from Shanghai in 2026, ahead of the Perseids at 11.0 an hour.

The radiant track over this city

Gemini carries the radiant. From Shanghai it clears the horizon at 18:27 on a bearing of 51° (NE), reaches 89.0° at 01:57 in the north, and drops back below the horizon at 09:27. Within the observing window it peaks at 88.9°.

When it gets dark here

Sunset over Shanghai is 16:52, civil twilight ends 17:19, and the sky reaches astronomical darkness — Sun 18° down — at 18:19. It holds until 05:18, with sunrise at 06:45: 10 h 59 min of real darkness inside 13 h 52 min of night.

Local solar midnight, the true middle of the night, falls at 23:48 here rather than at 00:00: Asia/Shanghai runs 6 minutes behind mean solar time at 121.46°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 26% lit and out of the way for 9 of the 13 sampled dark hours. Moonrise 10:51. Moonset 21:24. At the best hour it is 56.0° below the horizon, and the limiting magnitude works out at 4.00.

Why 14 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 88.9° of radiant altitude and limiting magnitude 4.00, Shanghai converts that ZHR into about 13.8 meteors an hour.

Hour by hour the modelled rate runs from 0.0 at 18:00 (radiant -4.5°) to 0.6 at 06:00 (radiant 39.1°), peaking at 13.8. That spread across 13 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 Shanghai rather than the only one.

Watching from around Shanghai

Shanghai is the 1st largest of the 300 cities covered here, with a population of 24.87 million at 12 m above sea level. The nearest other cities on the site are Suzhou (83 km W), Nantong (105 km NNW), Ningbo (150 km S) — 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.